Friday Thread: Is Your Kid Having Fun?
The essential youth sports question.
Hiya Good Gamers! A few weeks ago a fellow parent questioned why my older son isn’t specializing in a certain position within a certain sport…or a certain sport at all. My response was simple: He likes playing multiple positions and multiple sports. Translation: He’s having fun.
I then jumped off my little high horse and immediately thought, ‘oh shit, he is having fun, right?’ I asked him later that evening. He confirmed. Phew, I think.
It’s hardly controversial to say that fun should be the common thread among youth athletes of all ages. But sometimes this simple essential truth can get buried in all the other crap that is increasingly intertwined in youth sports. There are, of course, additional reasons to play sports besides having fun. Maybe you found the panacea of the low cost rec option that keeps your kid out of trouble. Maybe they need the structure or physical exertion to be healthy or regulate brain chemistry. And there are the rare cases of kids so driven to go pro, they yearn for the hardest core situation possible.
But all else being equal, if your kid’s not having fun, what are we doing? They get to be a kid and play sports. There is plenty of runaway as an adult to not have fun.
So all that to say, how do you know if your kid is having fun playing their sport? What traits jump out? Relatedly, how do/did you know if your kid is no longer having fun?
Hope we can learn a little from each other. The mic is yours.
My oldest daughter is four and started organized soccer for the first time. The first couple of weeks she seemed paralyzed on the field. Didn’t do much talking to the other girls. But I noticed at her practice this past week that she’s beginning to “get it.” She must be very analytical (I can only assume she was dissecting all she was taking in) because she was running around having so much fun and then I saw her having fun with her teammates whereas before she was keeping to herself. So I think part of having fun is understanding what your responsibilities are and how you fit in. I credit her coaches for being good communicators and being patient with their development!
For me, there are a lot of different ways— does my child ever play the sport outside of practice? Do they look engaged during games? Do they look forward to practice? When it comes time to register for the next season, do they want to?
But most importantly, I think the key is to let the sport belong to your kid— ie, it’s about them getting what they want out of the sport. That way they’ll have enough of sense of agency and control that they’ll give us the most obvious sign of whether they’re having fun or not— they’ll say so!