I get what people are saying about letting kids do what they love, and obviously I did that with my kids which is why one did sports and one didn’t. But a big part of letting kids do what they love is letting them have the opportunity to explore a bunch of different things and find what they love. Sports is so time consuming compared to many other extracurricular activities, it limits the opportunity to do that exploring. Kids get into youth sports in early elementary school, long before they are exposed to the other options, they have to get into it that early to have a chance to get on the competitive travel teams that start in later elementary school, in order to have a shot at making the team in middle school, and high school. We got both sons into both soccer and Cub Scouts in early elementary school, and both seemed to like them both. After a season of soccer on the same team Sports Son got recruited to a really competitive team, while Debate Son stayed on the more laid back team. Debate Son’s soccer coach had no problem with him missing one game a season to attend the cub scout campout, Sports Son’s competitive soccer coach made it clear that was out of the question. So Debate Son got to experience campouts, went on to Boy Scouts, and although he ultimately decided not to continue scouts in high school beyond his Star rank, all the activities he did in scouts, including the merit badges he earned, allowed him to explore a wide range of interests, including potential career paths. Debate Son did soccer through 5th grade, but starting in 6th grade things got “serious” and there wasn’t an option for kids to do laid back soccer anymore, soccer made him choose between it and scouts, and so he chose scouts. Then he started doing speech in 6th grade, where it was an after school club that had optional meetings twice a week after school, and you could sign up for as many or as few Saturday tournaments as you wanted. He went to the first tournament, enjoyed it, skipped the next tournament for a campout he wanted to go to, then won a trophy at the tournament after that, and was hooked. When he decided to drop scouts in 9th grade (around the time he got a taste of theatre with a role in the high school musical), it was after having the experience of scouts, speech and debate, and theatre to make an informed decision about what he loved the most and wanted to spend the most time on, at 15. And he still had the opportunity to join the newspaper after that. Sports Son missed out on the scout experience, and could never have come home at 11 years old and decided he wanted to go to a speech tournament, his coach wouldn’t have allowed him to miss a game, nor would he have been able to do the musical and decide theatre was fun but was not for him like my other son did, because the commitment competitive sports foreclosed the possibility of trying these new things and deciding if they were what he wanted or not back in 2nd or 3rd grade. So, I get what people are saying about letting kids pick the activities they enjoy rather than what would look good on a college application, but in that case we need to be clear-eyed about how little time and latitude competitive youth sports allows kids to actually gather the experience to make that choice.
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