Stop sacrificing your family on the altar of youth sports

Full disclosure: We were a sports family, extraordinaire. Football, ballet, gymnastics.

But then one child turned out to be immensely talented at another very consuming, very expensive Olympic sport. We upended our whole family to help her pursue this dream. As in, we moved to another state for her training, and Dad stayed behind to support the effort (i.e., pay the bills). For several years, we did not even live together as a family.

It almost broke us.

Why do we worship sports?

Most people seem to love sports, or at least, a sport. More watching than participating, of course — that’s why most of us don’t look like athletes. But we do love the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” to quote the old (I guess ancient, actually) ABC TV program "Wide World of Sports."

Plus, nobody does human interest stories better than sports journalists. They’re absolute masters of the tearjerker backstory: How the plucky little high school basketball player overcame rickets after his grandma died and became LeBron James. (Not LeBron James’ story, but I’m sure somewhere in there he may have been plucky.) Anyway, that kind of feel-good-now-I’m-rooting-for-him type of story.

Giving up unrushed family time is far too high a price to pay for the fleeting glory (or not) of a championship.

But you know the stories we don’t hear? The my-parents-divorced-after-living-apart-for-training stories.

There were a lot of those at the Olympic training center where my daughter trained. Or the non-prodigy-child-got-into-trouble-in-a-desperate-bid-for-attention story. Or the we-bankrupted-our-family-no-college-money-now story. We saw all of these play out in families around us.

For every heartwarming Olympic or NFL or Master’s tournament story, there are thousands of child sports stories that don’t end with a medal, ring, title, or even a scholarship. But they do end in damaged families, fractured relationships, debt, and regret. Of all the people who “gave up everything” to train — only a tiny fraction get a big reward.

Here’s the thing: Even the “big winners” pay this steep price, and in most cases, it's not worth it. Let me explain.

It’s a zero-sum game

You can’t give up huge chunks of your family life to the demanding taskmaster of organized kids’ sports without consequences. You can’t give up huge chunks of your family life for any reason without consequences. But in America today, organized sports are hijacking a healthy family dynamic.

Christian families in particular should have a higher goal for family life than endless shuttling to kids’ activities. But the endless shuttling hurts any family.

Let’s examine what everyone gives up when your child plays a sport, especially club team sports or extremely time-intensive individual sports.

The casualty, dead on arrival, is this: unrushed family time. And I submit for your consideration that giving up unrushed family time is far too high a price to pay for the fleeting glory (or not) of a championship or even a scholarship.

Why? Because what starts as an innocent once-a-week activity never gets less time-consuming (or less expensive). The demands only grow. Eventually, your family’s entire schedule — your whole family life — revolves around the coach’s requirements, not yours. Or the coaches’ requirements if you have more than one kid involved.

And if you have one kid involved, you have to make sure the others get “equal time” in another sport or activity. It’s only fair, right?

I’ve watched many parents go off in different directions every weekend, dad taking daughter to her weekend volleyball tournament, mom taking son to baseball practice and games. They reunite in exhaustion late Sunday night, only to start the week’s practice schedule all over again.

But this setup — catering to multiple children’s sports and activities — will eat up the fleeting time you have with your children and spit out nothing of value.

Even if one of them goes on to become an Olympic gold medalist, the cost will have been too high because, as I’ve written before, children are best served when they spend the bulk of their time with the people who love them the most: their family.

What is a family for?

Everyday family life at home is where faith is taught and demonstrated, where character is developed, where relationships are strengthened, where children are raised to become people who love God and others.

We need family time for all this to happen. Unhurried family dinners. Regular church attendance together. Time exploring the natural world together, minus screens. Taking the kids to visit a nursing home or to serve at a soup kitchen. Spontaneous weekend road trips to visit the grandparents, the cousins, the forest, or the beach. Long conversations about anything and everything.

As Christians, we are raising children to be people who love God and others. Children’s sports activities offer nothing toward this goal. What they do tend to emphasize, however, is the self. If my family’s life is mostly focused on my sport practices, games, and goals, I am learning that it really is all about me, despite what my parents say.

Actions speak much louder than words.

Individual sports, where there is no team component, are probably even worse because the focus is on one child individually. But make no mistake: Your kids don’t need to be on a sports team to learn teamwork. God put them on a team already, and it's your family.

That is the team that will permanently suffer if other sports and activities are allowed to dominate your family life.

If your children are currently in a demanding sport, you know that “team family” is not getting quality time together — or maybe any time together. When’s the last time you all sat down to eat dinner together without having to rush off? When’s the last time you had an unhurried, deep conversation?

The church issue is not the only issue

Club sports, in particular, seem to delight in scheduling practices and games in such a way that there is rarely an untouched weekend. I’ve watched countless families drop off the radar at church because tournaments and games are scheduled not only all day Saturday but on Sunday as well, often involving travel that eats up the whole weekend.

About a year ago, a pastor in Texas posted about this phenomenon on X and how their family took a stand against Sunday sports participation, which caused his daughter some grief. While I admire parents who push back against sports being the most important thing on their schedule, I can’t help but think there’s a lot more to discipling your children than showing up at church on Sunday.

In other words, it’s not enough to just draw a boundary around Sunday.

Discipleship takes time. Years, in fact, which is why God designed little people to begin life in families that show them the way, day in and day out, through loving and secure relationships with — again — the people who love them the most. Time goes by quickly — and it's something you never get back.

Every minute you spend focusing on a child’s sport is a minute you are not spending focusing on something more valuable. You cannot center your family life around a child’s sport or activity and not skew their view of him/herself and his/her relationship to your family and to the world. The message sent is really that it’s all about you, kid.

This may be, in part, what’s to blame for a generation of extraordinarily entitled young people. If your parents were not much more to you than chauffeurs to your every practice and activity (and the wallets to pay for it), you probably have an overinflated view of your own importance.

I’m not saying that every former child/teen athlete is insufferably self-centered, although a lot of them are. But I am saying they are not the people they could have been with mindfully attentive parenting instead of abandonment to a sport.

Was it all worth it?

Does the Olympic gold medal make up for a childhood spent training apart from your family?

The child who wins the medal surely thinks it’s worth it because that child has been trained, as noted, to consider his/her pursuit the most important thing. But it wasn’t.

Our culture absolutely glorifies this — the medal winner, the NFL Draft pick, the title holder. Every once in a while, there’s a story that highlights the sacrifices made to achieve the medal or title, and those sacrifices are always framed as noble.

But sacrificing the precious little time you have with your children on the altar of pursuing sports (or any other) excellence is not noble. It is tragic. Sending your child to train somewhere away from you is the ultimate tragic choice.

Christian parents: I beg you to prioritize better than we did.

A few final thoughts

Sports offer some benefits, to be sure. If they can be incorporated into your child’s life in a way that doesn’t suck up other more valuable pursuits, great.

In retrospect, which is all I have at this point, I wish we’d enrolled the whole family in martial arts together. That would have provided a “life sport” that we could have done together as a family.

Yeah, we have a lot of regret. We can’t get back the years our family was split up to accommodate a training regimen. We can’t have the conversations we would have had, the meals we would have enjoyed together, the trips we might have taken, or the opportunities to serve others together that we could have experienced.

So I implore you to prayerfully consider your extremely limited family time, choosing to use it for God’s glory instead of your child’s. This is, after all, why God put children in families — so they can grow in secure and loving guidance. They need you more than they need anything else while they’re under your roof.

For us, our time with our kids is, even now, by far our favorite time. We just wish we had used it better for them, for us, and for the Lord we love.