086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children?

Individual sports or competitive?  Recreational or organized?  Everyone gets a trophy or just the winners? And why do sports in the first place?  Granted there are some physical benefits, but don’t we also hope that our children will learn some kind of lessons about persistence and team work that will stand them in good stead in the future? In this interview with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman we discuss her book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, the advantages that sports can confer on children (which might not be the ones you expect!), as well as what children themselves think about these issues. Read Full Transcript Jen: 01:23 Hello and welcome to today's episode of Your Parenting Mojo podcast, and today's episode actually comes to us courtesy of a question from my husband who said “You should really do an episode on the benefits of sports for children.” And I said, sure and I said about researching it and I actually stumbled on Dr. Hilary Levey Friedman’s book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, and I really got more than I bargained for with that book. Dr. Friedman has studied not just the advantages and drawbacks associated with participation in sport as an activity, but also much broader sociological issues like how participation in sports helped children to increase what she calls Competitive Kid Capital and can actually impact the child's academic and lifelong success. So, Dr. Friedman received her Bachelor's Degree from Harvard and Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She's currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University and is the mother of a preschooler and a first grader. Welcome Dr. Friedman. Dr. Friedman: 02:24 Thanks for having me. Jen: 02:25 You're right there in the thick of it with us. Dr. Friedman: 02:27 Yes. Jen: 02:29 So, I want to kind of start at the beginning or what seems like the beginning to me here because decades ago it seems as though it was far more common for children to engage in really unstructured outdoor playtime rather than organized sports. I'm curious as to your thoughts on what has shifted here and what do you think children are missing out by not having as much of this unstructured outdoor play? Dr. Friedman: 02:51 Well, it depends what time we're talking about. I mean if we’re talking about 200 years ago, I mean kids were working in the fields and 50 years after that, they were working in factories. So about a hundred years ago, 1918, we're seeing the formation of kids' athletic leagues in particular and also some other organized activities, but it's really more of like a popular myth or a misconception that kids use to spend all this time playing and having free time. The 1950s, which is that time we sort of pulled up is this Utopian time of kids playing in the streets and playing stickball and baseball and all of that is more the anomaly rather than the norm. So, today it is absolutely true that kids spend so much more time, especially, it depends on what age exactly we're talking about, but they spend a lot of time in organized play, not just in organized sports, but we just have to think about the ways in which that took a different shape historically in American childhood. Jen: 03:56 Yeah. Yeah. So, it's less that they were always able to engage in this unstructured play and whether that was sort of a phenomenon of its time just like the structured play as a phenomenon of its time today. Dr. Friedman: 04:07 Yes. Jen: 04:08 Do you think there are unique benefits associated with that unstructured time that maybe children are not able to realize today through the structured play that happens? Dr. Friedman: 04:17 Again, I think it depends on the age group we're talking about, so I'll limit it to elementary school aged kids just because that's the age group that Playing to Win focuses upon. So, I think certainly kids are working out all kinds of ideas, both intellectual but also social and moral when they play together and come up with their own games. Now, I don't think that having organized play is mutually exclusive to that either. So, I'll just give you one example in particular, part of Playing to Win is also about chess, not just about sports. And so I remember being at a chess summer camp for a few weeks and observing there and meeting families and the kids would play chess and then there'd be a recess time and then they'd play a little bit more chess and then have lunch and then have like a much longer period of recess and go out to a playground. And they came up with all these games that they invented on the playground and with pool noodles even though there wasn't a pool nearby and they had rules. It was very elaborate. So yes, they were spending time unstructured play as well, but they also had this space to be creative, workout rules, work together. So, I think it is possible for both of those things to coexist and both of those things are important for kids as well. Jen: 05:35 Oh, that's fascinating. In reading your book, I sort of had the impression that the kids were sort of locked up in a conference hall for 10 hours at a stretch playing chess. Dr. Friedman: 05:44 Well, sometimes at the tournaments it feels much more like that. But that's again not like the everyday experience of doing this. Jen: 05:53 Yeah. Okay. All right, so I'm curious because I think that this is where most of our minds go and certainly my husband's mind was going when he asked the question, what are some of the more immediate benefits for children participating in organized sporting activities? Dr. Friedman: 06:08 So, immediately obviously there is the physical fitness aspect, there's also the teamwork and those are things that you can get by just playing at school or playing recreationally. I think when you up it to the more competitive experience, that's when other lessons kick in as well. So, there's pretty much if you have to think about it, but there are very few sporting experiences where there's not some element of a time limit or some sense of time and rules you have to adhere to. So again, you can get that somewhat from doing it recreationally, but when you're doing it competitively and by that I mean it's organized, adults are running it and records are kept, then you get something much different out of that experience. Performing under pressure for example. Jen: 06:54 Yeah. Okay. So, we're not necessarily talking about elite levels of participation. This is your kid's little league is the same because adults are running it, they are providing the timekeeping and the score keeping and so the children are participating under some time pressure. Dr. Friedman: 07:10 You’re exactly correct. Yeah, I mean I think to be more specific, what I'm talking about here, when I say competitive is a league where you have to try out or not everybody is guaranteed a spot and that sort of thing. So most little league is, I would consider recreational, but if there's an all-star league or any of these what we call in the US travel teams that kids are not elite, they might have some dreams of becoming elite someday, but they certainly are not elite at this moment. Jen: 07:37 Right. Okay. So, there are a number of other sort of health benefits as well that I was reading about things like health and bone density, lower rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease and diabetes and these kinds of things as well. Do you see those as important benefits associated with a lot of different kinds of sporting activities as well as with unstructured playtime? Dr. Friedman: 07:59 Definitely. But there's a caveat there which is that when anything becomes too competitive, there's a health risk too. So we see a lot in increasing number of youth sports injuries. I mean obviously concussions are the most well-known example at this point in time, but at other moments there's been concerns about different joints, elbows, knees, increasing rates of girls who have particular types of knee injuries. We're seeing more and more overused injuries because kids are specializing at younger ages and so yes, there are these positive benefits and then you get to this inflection point and you're like, wait, there might actually be some bad physical things that go along with that. Jen: 08:38 Yeah, and this is just a hypothesis here that I'm generating on the fly, but I'm wondering if this recreational level of sport is actually better for a child's health than specializing and maybe I've heard of people who are very good at sports will say, oh yeah, I played three different sports until I was 12 and then I specialized and maybe that that general level of fitness actually serves them better than early specialization. Are you aware of any research on that? Dr. Friedman: 09:01 Yes, there's definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence by those who are professional like you mentioned, like Tom Brady famously says, he played all kinds of sports until he was much older and so there's this cross training idea. You're not just working the same muscle or muscle groups over and over again. So, you're developing other types of skills too. So, let's say you were really into football, but if you play soccer too, then you're developing the foot-eye coordination in addition to the hand-eye coordination. So, that's definitely a big thing and there's been a lot of research by those who focus on Sports Medicine and Pediatric Sports Medicine that thinks that this is quite...