When is competition in youth sport healthy and unhealthy?
Competition is healthy when adults – parents and coaches – focus on encouraging co-operation and personal improvement rather than emphasizing outcomes. That’s when sport can be the ultimate character builder. But when kids are taught that certain behaviours are acceptable in sport that aren’t acceptable outside sport – when coaches encourage players to hurt and intimidate other players or to cheat – adolescents may not be mature enough to stand up and say they won’t act that way because they see it within the context of sport as acceptable. Brenda Bredemeier, a researcher at the University of Notre Dame, calls this bracketed morality – when you set aside your normal sense of what’s right and wrong in a certain context. So when you’re doing a sport, you think, “Well, it’s a contact sport, so I can be overly aggressive.” And it doesn’t help when officials are determining what’s right or wrong because it takes all the responsibility off the child for determining what’s right and wrong. Ho
