As part of an ethnographic study on young people and learning (the knowledge in motion across contexts of learning project, set in Norway), we interviewed a diverse sample of parents of young teenagers, many of whom were active in organized sports. The parents described their level of involvement in sport in a way that contrasted sharply to our own experiences participating in youth sports in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then most parents were absent from the sports fields. This new role of sports in the practice of parenthood is what we investigate in this study. The purpose is to further the understanding of the cultural processes that drive what we see as a marked generational change in the relationship between organized sports and the practice of parenthood. In contrast to previous studies, we also focus on the relationship between generational change and classed patterns in parenting. Our data suggest that across social classes, parents see involvement in sports as normal, and as a way to connect to the child emotionally and to further the child's development. We interpret the significance of sports in the parent-child relationship as related both to the normalization of youth sports that the parents experienced when they grew up, and to the new cultural ideas of parenthood that they encounter as adults. We find that there are tensions embedded in this new form of parenthood that are particularly evident in what we call 'deep involvement', an intensified form of parental engagement with youth sports that is practiced primarily by fathers in the economic fraction of the middle class. We conclude that the new role of sport in the practice of parenthood is a classed as well as a generational phenomenon.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Growing up in a family with an affinity for sports increases the likelihood of participating in club-organised sports. Few studies to date have addressed whether the importance of family sport culture is stable or changes during the teenage years. This article examines the association between family sport culture and participation in club-organised sports during teenage years and whether it differs between boys and girls. We utilise data from Norway and the comprehensive 'Young in Oslo 2015' survey (N = 6121; 79% response rate; ages 13-18). Three questions were combined into a measure of family sport culture in the present study: the importance of sport in the family, parents' training habits, and whether parents would like their children to participate in sports. We observed a clear positive relationship between family sport culture and participation in cluborganised sports. Except for a slightly weakened relationship with age among girls, the relationship was equally strong in all age groups. We suggest that the overall continuity in the relevance of family sport culture for young people's sport participation reflects a prolonged socialisation effect that we utilise Bourdieu's theory of habitus to understand.
Opting out of youth sports: how can we understand the social processes involved?Sports researchers often examine the subject of youth quitting sports through quantitative surveys using fixed-choice questionnaires. In this paper, we analyze 1,248 descriptions offered by youth in the survey Young in Oslo 2018 when asked to explain why they had left organized sports. We examine their reasons for opting out of sports and how different reasons may interact. Similar to studies with fixed-choice questions, we found both sports-internal and sports-external reasons for quitting. Our main finding concerns how sports-internal and sports-external processes appear together and reinforce the challenges some youth experience in their day-to-day lives in terms of their sports participation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.