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.
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.
Parents take the fun out of sports
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.
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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.
An emphasis on fun instead of elite performance can ease the pressure on children in sports. – recep-bg/E+/Getty Images
Most kids don’t play college sports
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.
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.
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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