Parents are turning one of the best things for kids’ mental health into one of the worst

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Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She hosts the American Academy of Pediatrics Healthy Children podcast for parents.

Soon after our oldest son turned 4, he was invited to play in an exclusive basketball league with 5- and 6-year-olds. We were all so excited.

Our little guy was good at basketball, and we weren’t the only ones who saw it. He had been having fun playing with other 3- and 4-year-olds on a local team, and he was always the best one in the group. If we wanted to challenge him, shouldn’t we put him in an environment where he had to push himself? Playing with older kids who were also talented seemed like a great idea.

My husband, a former college basketball player, and I, a pediatrician, paid the fees and rearranged our schedules to bring him to practice every week.

What happened next was, sadly, predictable in retrospect: At first, he was excited. He put on a team jersey that almost reached his knees and ran onto the court. He wowed everyone with his dribbling, and he could make shots the older kids were missing. But as the drills got more complex, his 4-year-old brain couldn’t keep up. And when it was time to race, he was almost always last.

Why sports can be so toxic to boys and how we unravel that culture

Over the weeks that followed, we watched him get anxious ahead of practice, then refuse to go. It just wasn’t fun anymore, he told us.

I phoned my child psychology and psychiatry friends and came up with strategies to get him through the season. For some reason I thought it was important that he finish what he started. But the experience left us wondering how we had managed to ruin the fun.

As I learned from talking to other families, we were not the only well-meaning parents who inadvertently turned one of the most protective childhood experiences into a stressful one.

For generations, children’s sports happened closer to home and looked more like the sandlot: neighborhood games, recreational leagues and community teams, alongside plenty of informal play. Kids of mixed ages organized their own games and made up their own rules, while adults stayed mostly on the sidelines or stayed away entirely.

That same spirit shaped the early organized version of youth sports. Little League , founded in 1939, began as something intentionally local: 30 children on three teams playing summer baseball in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Its founder described the goal as teaching sportsmanship, fair play and teamwork. Kids in this era also tended to move between sports with the seasons rather than specializing year-round from an early age.

Somewhere in the 1990s and 2000s, the unstructured, local, low-stakes version of youth sports started to change. Travel and club teams multiplied. Private coaching and “elite” training academies became a lucrative industry, and the idea that a child needed to specialize in one sport, year-round, by age 8 or 9 to have any shot at competing later took hold. The science did not support this view, but the market did, and so the messaging to and among parents gradually shifted.

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I understand the pull to participate because I felt it myself. When you see your child excel, opting them into more competitive environments doesn’t feel like pressure — it feels like your responsibility. Nobody wants to be the parent who let potential go to waste. And underneath that is at times a quieter, more transactional hope: that the travel fees, the private lessons, the missed birthday parties might eventually amount to a college scholarship or, in some cases, a professional career.

But the numbers tell a different story. About 7% of high school athletes go on to compete in any sport in college, according to NCAA participation data , and less than 2% receive an academic scholarship . The odds narrow further from there. Depending on the sport, the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that only 0.2% to 0.5% of high school athletes ever turn pro.

These statistics aren’t, of course, a reason to keep kids off teams. They’re a reason to be honest about what we’re actually optimizing for and what we lose when we start treating children’s rec leagues like a career on-ramp.

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How to protect your kids when they play sports, according to doctors

A large, recent systematic review of nearly 190 studies found that sports participation is consistently linked to higher self-esteem, greater life satisfaction and lower depression and anxiety in kids, with team sports showing stronger effects than individual ones. But the American Academy of Pediatrics emphasizes that those benefits are tied to sustained, well-rounded, enjoyable participation, not to elite performance.

Early specialization and intensive training are instead associated with higher rates of burnout, anxiety, depression and attrition. And attrition is exactly what we’re seeing.

“It’s not fun anymore” is consistently the reason most cited by kids who quit — not injury or lack of talent.

Fixing this problem is not hard — see how Olympic gold-medal-winning Norway does it — but it goes against the culture. Let kids play more than one thing. Let them lose without it feeling so incredibly consequential. Let a practice be something they look forward to rather than dread. If we want sports to do what they’ve always been able to do for children — build confidence, regulate stress, teach them how to be part of something — we have to stop treating kids’ sports like the beginning of a college recruiting campaign and let them be what they were supposed to be all along: fun.

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How parents can keep youth sports fun for kids

We eventually did find our way back to fun with our son. After he finished his “elite” basketball season, he took a break and chose to swim and play soccer instead.

This fall he decided to return to basketball on a team with kids of various ages, including almost 5-year-olds. Will we resist the urge to push him further if he shines there, too? I sure hope so.

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伊迪丝·布拉乔-桑切斯博士是纽约市哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心的儿科初级保健医生。她主持美国儿科学会面向家长的“健康儿童”播客节目。

我们的大儿子刚满4岁不久，就受邀参加一个专为5、6岁孩子设立的篮球联赛。我们全家都非常兴奋。

我们家小家伙篮球打得很好，而且不止我们注意到这一点。他一直在当地一个球队里和其他三四岁的孩子一起玩，而且总是队里最厉害的。如果我们想挑战他，是不是应该把他放到一个需要他不断进步的环境中呢？和一些同样有天赋的大孩子一起打球，听起来是个不错的主意。

我的丈夫曾是大学篮球队员，而我是一名儿科医生，我们支付了费用，并调整了我们的日程安排，以便每周带他去训练。

接下来发生的事，事后看来，令人遗憾，也在意料之中：起初，他很兴奋。他穿上一件几乎垂到膝盖的队服，跑进球场。他运球的技巧让所有人都惊叹不已，他还能投进一些大孩子投不进的球。但随着训练变得越来越复杂，他四岁的大脑就跟不上了。到了比赛环节，他几乎总是垫底。

为什么体育运动对男孩如此有害，以及我们如何才能打破这种文化？

接下来的几周，我们看到他每次训练前都会变得焦虑不安，然后干脆拒绝去。他告诉我们，训练对他来说已经不再有趣了。

我打电话给我的儿童心理学家和精神病学家朋友们，想出了一些办法来帮助他度过这段时期。不知为何，我当时觉得让他把事情做完很重要。但这段经历让我们不禁反思，我们怎么会把原本的乐趣搞砸了。

从与其他家庭的交谈中我了解到，我们并不是唯一出于好意却无意中将最能保护孩子的童年经历变成充满压力的经历的父母。

几代以来，儿童体育运动都在家附近进行，更像是在沙地上玩耍：邻里间的比赛、业余联赛和社区球队，以及大量的非正式游戏。不同年龄段的孩子们自己组织游戏，制定规则，而成年人大多在场边观望，或者干脆置身事外。

这种精神也塑造了早期有组织的青少年体育运动。成立于1939年的少棒联盟（Little League）最初是一个地方性项目：30名孩子组成三支队伍，在宾夕法尼亚州威廉斯波特参加夏季棒球比赛。其创始人将目标描述为培养孩子们的体育精神、公平竞争和团队合作。那个时代的孩子们也倾向于根据季节变换运动项目，而不是从小就专注于某一项运动。

大约在20世纪90年代和21世纪初，青少年体育运动那种非正式、本地化、低风险的模式开始发生变化。旅行队和俱乐部数量激增。私人教练和“精英”训练营成为利润丰厚的产业，一种观念开始盛行：孩子必须在8、9岁时就专注于一项运动，并且全年训练，才能有机会在未来参加比赛。科学并不支持这种观点，但市场却支持，因此，家长们听到的以及家长之间传递的信息也逐渐发生了转变。

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我理解那种想要参与的冲动，因为我自己也曾有过这种感受。当你看到孩子表现出色时，让他们进入竞争更激烈的环境并不会让你感到压力，反而会让你觉得这是你的责任。没有人愿意成为那个让孩子潜力白白浪费的父母。而在这背后，有时还隐藏着一种更隐晦、更务实的希望：希望那些旅行费用、私人课程、错过的生日聚会，最终能换来一份大学奖学金，或者在某些情况下，一份职业。

但数据却呈现出截然不同的景象。根据NCAA的参赛数据，大约只有7%的高中运动员会进入大学继续参加任何体育项目，而获得学术奖学金的人不到2%。从大学开始，成功的几率就更低了。美国儿科学会指出，根据运动项目的不同，只有0.2%到0.5%的高中运动员最终能成为职业运动员。

当然，这些统计数据并不是阻止孩子们加入球队的理由。它们提醒我们，应该诚实地思考我们真正追求的是什么，以及当我们把儿童娱乐联赛当作职业生涯的跳板时，我们会失去什么。

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医生教你如何保护孩子在运动时的安全

一项近期对近190项研究进行的大型系统性综述发现，参与体育运动与儿童更高的自尊心、更佳的生活满意度以及更低的抑郁和焦虑水平密切相关，其中团队运动的效果优于个人运动。但美国儿科学会强调，这些益处与持续、全面、愉悦的参与密切相关，而非与精英级别的竞技表现相关。

相反，过早的专业化和高强度训练反而会导致更高的倦怠、焦虑、抑郁和人员流失率。而人员流失正是我们目前所看到的现象。

“觉得没意思了”一直是孩子们放弃这项运动的最常见原因——而不是受伤或缺乏天赋。

解决这个问题并不难——看看奥运金牌得主挪威是怎么做的——但这与传统文化相悖。让孩子们尝试多种运动。让他们学会接受失败，而不是把失败看得那么重大。让训练成为他们期待的事情，而不是恐惧的事情。如果我们希望体育运动能够像以往那样，为孩子们带来益处——建立自信、缓解压力、教会他们如何融入集体——我们就必须停止把孩子们的体育运动当作大学招生宣传的开端，而是让体育运动回归其本来的本质：快乐。

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家长如何让孩子们享受青少年体育运动的乐趣

我们最终还是找到了和儿子一起享受乐趣的方式。在他结束了“精英”篮球赛季后，他休息了一段时间，转而选择游泳和踢足球。

今年秋天，他决定重返篮球场，加入一支由不同年龄段的孩子组成的球队，其中一些孩子甚至快5岁了。如果他在那里也表现出色，我们会克制住让他更进一步的冲动吗？我真心希望如此。

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