Sports/Athletics, Children and

History of Children in Sports

The rise of competitive sports for children (i.e., boys under the age of 12) occurred in the United States during the early part of the 20th century (see Smoll & Smith, 2002). The inclusion of sports in the educational curriculum of schools across the nation brought organized athletics closer to the young child than ever before in the history of the United States. The impetus for these changes was a zeitgeist that focused the attention of educators and professionals on making childhood a safe and productive developmental period and occurred at roughly the same time as the rise in the child welfare movement (see Hartup & Weinberg, 2002). The organized competitive sports arena emerged to encourage boys to focus their time on positive activities and to attempt to reduce the delinquent and antisocial tendencies of adolescents who were largely unsupervised. Before the 1930s, academic institutions and a few organizations (e.g., YMCA, Boy Scouts, etc.) sponsored recreational activities and children's sporting events. Starting in the 1930s, physical education professionals began to criticize the emphasis on competition and argued that the emotional and physical strain associated with competitive athletics was inhibiting children's academic progress.

These developments served as the impetus for the development of organized sports programs outside of educational institutions, and by the 1960s, millions of American boys were participating (Smoll & Smith, 2002). This phenomenon, however, largely excluded girls and women, despite notable exceptions (e.g., the 1944–1945 All-American Girls Baseball League), and [Page 1049]it was not until the 1972 Federal Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX were adopted, which specifically prohibits sex discrimination in educational settings, that equal access and availability of competitive sport programs for girls began. Before Title IX, roughly 300,000 females participated in interscholastic athletics nationally, and today, the number has reached well over 2 million athletes (President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, 1997). These fundamental legal changes led to educators' and applied psychologists' heightened interest in studying children's sports participation and the effects of competitive activities on young children's social, emotional, psychological, and biological development (see Smoll & Smith, 2002).

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