Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I've been thinking about children in sports and this was brought about by a conversation with a mum and a dad who were talking about having their child play in various little leagues. And the whole question about how young should a child play, at what age should they begin playing sports? It's a hard one to answer.
And I did talk about this at some length within the book Beyond Winning that I co-authored, which has the title of Smart Parenting in a Toxic Youth Sport Environment. But one thing really stood out to me with this question for their son, who was aged around 10, was he was beginning to play recreational baseball. And the question came up, was it healthy or was it not? Now this is a much, much larger question.
But there was something that stood out for me in the chat that we were having, because the team that he was on, the coach didn't seem to really cultivate much in the way of social relationship between the kids. He didn't have much of a social relationship himself with the kids. His attitude was very, well, somewhat competitive, perhaps it'd be fair to say.
And the kids, of course, picked that up. And there's a trickle down effect. And so there weren't really all that many good friendships in the group.
And also the parents on the sidelines really were wanting the kids to win. It was a pretty good team. And there was a lot of encouragement, which sometimes spilled over into that well-known, you know, regretful shouting and so on from the sidelines that we as parents can so easily fall into if we're not very careful to have our, you know, encouragements from the sidelines be positive.
But the upshot of that, the parents' attitude and the coaches' attitude sort of spilled over into the kids, and they didn't have much fun either. So there wasn't much in the way of friendship. There wasn't much in the way of fun from what this mom and dad were describing to me.
And I thought, well, you know, this is one of three or four conversations I've had over quite recent times about this. And there was a stark difference between earlier conversations that I've had around sports teams where there had been fun, and there were friends within the team that was really cultivated, and those situations where there was not. In the situations where there was fun and friends at the forefront of what the team was all about, something really interesting happens.
It's pretty simple, really, is that, okay, so kids go off and they play a game with another team. And I always say play a game with, not against. That's for me a real sort of giveaway if one starts describing playing against a team.
It's with a team. And where there was fun and friends, if the game was, one, great, you know, you've got your friends, and wow, that was a lot of fun. Two, I mean, no one really likes losing, to be honest.
It's not something that kids, you know, feel is very much fun. But when you win, okay, there's friends and there's fun. But when you lose, which is going to happen a lot, there's still friends.
Okay, that wasn't as much fun as you would have liked. It maybe would have, you know, felt like it was more fun. It was funner to quote what kids talk about, but you still got your friends.
You've got one out of the two. And that's really important. You didn't have, you know, fun, but you still had your friends.
Now, some games you can lose, and it still can be fun. If a coach is really good, and the parents are really onto it, you know, you might say something to a son or a daughter with, well, you know, that was great being with your friends, and you didn't win. But boy, that game seemed like a lot of fun.
You know, and some kids will relate to that, for sure. But often they won't. And so this difference between these couple of conversations I was having with coaches that really cultivate that social aspect of what's going on, and parents who can come in behind that and join that as well, there seemed to be such a sharp difference between how the child was after the game.
You know, when the child got home, how did they feel about that? On the ride home? How did they feel about that? Because where there's too much emphasis placed on competition, what happens is that it seems to erode both, not only the fun, but it erodes friendship as well. And, you know, it's, it's over 70% of all kids who start sports before the age of 12, quit before the age of 16. And that's a really big deal.
Because, you know, having a 17 and 19 year old kids myself, when they get to those later teen years, you want them to be passionate about sports and outdoor activities, because there's a lot of other things they could be passionate about, right? You know, that we don't want our kids involved in, we totally don't, we just it's so great when they're focused and passionate about their team, the social relationships in the team, mixing with other kids who are athletic and getting involved in that sort of stuff is just what we want when our kids are in those later teen years, you know, provided it doesn't go too far, of course, and become negative. But how can we if we do start kids off in sports before the age of 12, which is so much the culture in Western society, I kind of wish we wouldn't do it, frankly. But if we do go down that road, it's, it's just couldn't be more important to select a team that puts in the forefront, friends and fun, because then there's every likelihood, they'll stay with it through 12, 13, 14.
And they'll develop a lifelong love of athletics of sports, and be able to stick with it through their teens when we really want them to. So both in the short term, just how they're feeling on the ride home and later that night, and through the next couple of days after a game, but also how they're going to experience this in the more medium term in their later teen years. For all those reasons, that social emotional health of a team is couldn't be more important.
So friends and fun in sports. Okay, hope that was helpful. Bye bye now.
