Recently—especially over the past thirty years—there have been significant changes in the way middle class American children play. Whereas children and adolescents used to spend a good deal of time engaged in unsupervised play and games, today sports are much more likely to be pursued through organized private sports leagues.

The entry of these organized leagues into the world of older children’s play has changed the nature of that play. For one thing, these days, among younger adolescents, the level of play in sports such as basketball and soccer is noticeably higher than in the past. That’s the result of an explosion in the amount of instruction and coaching available to aspiring players.

Although some of the adult involvement in these leagues is on a voluntary basis, for the most part club sports like volleyball or hockey cost money, often lots of money. Children’s sports have entered the economy, and this has changed their character: they have become consumer goods and services that must be purchased. And often there is a genuine correlation between the product and the cost—to excel, children need good (often high priced) coaches, they need to travel nationwide to compete with other top athletes, etc.

One unfortunate consequence of these changes is that in many cases children are pushed too hard on the physical level, they are trained to use their bodies in ways that aren’t developmentally appropriate. A striking example from Mark Hyman’s book Until it Hurts: These days little league pitchers often learn to throw curve balls, a pitch that puts considerable strain on still-growing arms. That may be part of the reason that so few of the players who are stars in the Little League World Series ever make it to the major leagues. And baseball is by no means the only sport where these sorts of things are happening. In a number of youth sports it is increasingly common for children of high school and even middle school age to undergo major surgeries to address over-use injuries.

So, why did our society substitute this new more expensive and dangerous form of play for the older one? The answer has to do with what I have called the culture of entertainment. We love to be entertained, and the result is that entrepreneurs have a financial incentive to convert as much of life as possible into entertainment. The fact is that intensely competitive children’s sports are hugely entertainment for the parents of these children. And if you happen to be the parent of a child with genuine talent or skill, it’s even better: The child can become a small scale celebrity, and the parent can bask in the glow of junior’s success.

The adults who coach the teams and sell the equipment and run the tournaments promote youth sports in part because they can make money in these ways. The adults who get to watch entertaining competitions starring their children are happy to participate by spending the thousands of dollars needed to support this system. It’s a win-win for these adults. But sometimes it isn’t a win for the children who are pressured to perform and may even end up with painful injuries that limit their activity for the rest of their lives. If you asked the kids, many of them might be just as happy putting together pick-up games at the playground.

Photo by Edwin Martinez.

Our culture is saturated with romantic realism—stories and images that depict a world that is just a little bit better than the one you and I dwell in. One of the primary sources of romantic realism is advertising, which depicts products that are beautiful and new, which work perfectly and easily, and are always associated with beautiful, smiling people. Or take a brief look at the programming on your television: there you will see perfect looking people having perfect adventures and romances, or saying really witty things to one another. We assume that TV dramas and comedies are about human beings like us, except the characters aren’t really like us, they are just a little bit better. Even when they are worse, as with the bad guys, they are better at being bad than inhabitants of this world. Romantic realism is these perfected images of our lives, which confront us every time we turn around. (Reality TV is another matter, one I will have to discuss at another time).

So, what is the effect of being exposed to all of these images of perfection? Let’s take a specific example: Today our romantic relationships are highly unstable compared to 50 years ago; more people establish and break up cohabiting relationships than they used to, and divorce rates today ar roughly twice what they were half a century ago. Could these changes have anything to do with the growing prominence and power of romantic realism in our culture?

When we watch a romantic movie or read a romance novel, the couple have a love for one another that is passionate and all-consuming. Most of us are familiar with passionate and all-consuming love, because we have felt it ourselves. However, if we are old enough to have had some long term relationships, we very likely have also felt this overwhelming passion fade, to be replaced (in the best of cases) by feelings like love, affection, respect, friendship, mutual attraction, and so on. But this part isn’t in the romantic stories, they are based on romantic realism, and in them it’s all passion all the time.

One might guess that all the exposure to the perfect romance of novels and movies could influence what we think should happen in our real-world intimate relationships. And indeed we all know of cases (perhaps we have been involved in them ourselves) in which one partner in a relationship starts an affair so that they can once again feel the passion of “falling madly in love.” Some authors have argued that romantic expectations are an important factor that led to the spectacular growth of divorce rates in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, empirical research has not necessarily supported this argument. One study conducted by Susan Sprecher and Sandra Metts found that holding strong romantic beliefs did not predict whether a relationship endured or broke up over a four year period. And indeed, one could argue that romantic beliefs could in many cases contribute to the stability of a relationship, if the couple can manage to continue to feel romantic about one another.

So what’s the take-away here? Can we conclude anything at all about the effect of romantic realism on romantic relationships? Although I can’t (yet) provide any decisive evidence, I suspect that romantic realism does in fact have some strong effects on us, but these effects occur more at the level of emotions than thoughts.

There is so much romantic realism in our world because it’s highly emotionally stimulating to get caught up in fictional situations full of adventure and eroticism and drama. In other words, romantic realism is fun. Our media compete to offer ever higher levels of stimulation, because that’s what sells. In this cultural context, we come to want, even need, ever higher levels of stimulation–without it we start to feel bored. This influences our lives in many ways, including our relationships, for it means that we are ever hungry for stimulation and never quite satisfied with what we have. And surely that has something to do with the instability of long term relationships in contemporary society.

Photo by SimonShaw

Photo by Minke Wagenaar

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Europe where, among other things, I visited some of the world’s greatest art museums. Standing among some of the most renowned treasures of Western civilization, I felt… miserable and bored. Ten minutes in a museum seems like an hour to me. By some strange arrangement, 15 minutes in a museum make my feet hurt so much I can barely stand, whereas out in the world I can walk for hours. All this proves that I am a Philistine, it is nothing to be proud of. But as I looked around at my fellow museum goers, I could have sworn that many of them were as desperate to get out of there as I was. So maybe a few other readers will have some idea what I mean when I ask “why are museums supposed to be so wonderful but in fact, so exhausting?”

Well, museums are supposed to be educational, and as an educator I should be all for them. But I find it next to impossible to learn anything in a museum, whether about art or history or dinosaurs. Even if there are little placards packed with information about the exhibit, I don’t have the patience to read it all (remember about my feet?) nor the background to put it in context. I have no doubt that those who majored in art history in college can be fascinated by the differences between Tintoretto and Botticelli, but I majored in math.

The paintings suggest another reason for museums: contemplation of great art is a pleasure in itself. I can buy this, because I am capable of sensing beauty in music or a landscape, I guess I’m just sort of challenged when it comes to paintings. Or maybe it’s the elbows and nudgings from the crowds of tourists who are trying to contemplate the same beauty as I am that sort of sours the experience for me.

So, I’m saying the unspeakable: Everyone agrees that museums are a fabulous cultural treasure, a sign of our refinement. I’m saying that I find them a source of torment and I suspect I’m not the only one. So why are great museums so packed that people are willing to stand in line for hours just to get in?

Many of us Philistines, I suggest, don’t get much education in museums, nor do we successfully contemplate the beauty of great art. Rather, we want to go the museum to see the famous things that are in the museums: The Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, etc. And given that perfectly good pictures of these art works are in fact widely available, it’s clear that for many the motivation is just to get close to these famous objects. It’s no different from the desire to see a movie star or other celebrity in person. By some weird logic of the contemporary mind, famous things are so exciting that getting close to them makes us cool by extension (“And of course we saw the David, it was magnificent.”)

And that brings me at last to my point, a point about the values promoted by a culture of entertainment. Many of us come to understand much of the world in terms of the values of entertainment, even though we are reluctant to acknowledge this. We may claim we attend the museum to appreciate or learn about art—and surely some do—but really what most of us are after is to indulge our unfathomable fascination with fame.

Photo by Mark Sebastian

Our society’s fascination with stimulating experiences of entertainment—3D movie spectaculars, glamorous celebrities, fat-and-sugar enhanced food, etc.—has a few downsides. One of them is that experiences that aren’t entertaining no longer seem very compelling. If you are used to highly processed foods with a lot of fat and salt, simple whole grains are likely to taste like cardboard. And when a product or experience is not compelling to people, less of it is produced, which is likely to mean that it costs more. Continuing with the food example, today feeding a family with fresh, non-processed foods is likely to be more expensive (in money and time) than picking up pizza and other fast food.

This is what I call “the logic of entertainment,” although I could also borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin: As he spoke of the “survival of the fittest,” today we could speak of the “survival of the most entertaining.” Whichever phrase one uses, the point is the same: when someone figures out how to make a product or a process entertaining, it’s a pretty good bet that over the long run the entertaining form of the product or process will survive and the less entertaining forms will not.

In recent posts I have applied this idea to sports in contemporary society. Increasingly our society is investing its resources in sports as entertainment and withdrawing resources from participatory sports. Why? In part because participatory sports aren’t very entertaining. We have evidently decided, for example, that there isn’t much point in providing sports opportunities for kids who are never going to be stars.

The same argument can be applied in a number of different areas. Take for example intimate relationships. When people talk about the head over heels experience of “falling in love,” they are talking about finding entertainment in an intimate relationship. “Falling in love” means experiencing highly arousing emotions as you interact with and even think about your partner: longing, sexual desire, happiness, etc. etc. In fact, the experience of falling in love is suspiciously similar to the joy of becoming lost in a game or a story: you forget yourself in your fascination with the partner, time seems to be suspended, your interest in the world outside fades.

Historians and anthropologists tend to agree that people from other times and places have not placed the same value on romance—a form of entertainment—that we do today. As a matter of fact, in both Europe and America the idea that marriage should be based on “falling in love” is quite new, having found wide acceptance only in the 19th century. It’s probably not a coincidence that this was also the period in which romantic novels started to be widely read.

Thus today we can see how the logic of entertainment has come to dominate our thinking about intimate relationships, so much so that other ways of thinking about these relationships just don’t make sense to us. We expect our partner to provoke strong emotional responses like those described in novels. Other ways of evaluating intimate relationships—compatibility, friendship, financial considerations, etc. seem almost offensive. And of course, many relationships end because one “falls in love” with someone new, and that makes the relationship one shares with one’s spouse seem dull and boring by comparison. Entertainment in relationships can be a lot of fun, but the idea that it’s the most important aspect of a partnership is also the source of a lot of suffering.

Photo by Moazzam Brohi

When I first started to watch my daughter play in competitive sports matches, I discovered something that most normal humans probably already knew: it’s almost as much fun to watch your child play a sport as it is to play yourself. Since I’ve studied engagement with play and games, I have a confident guess about why this is so: We can gain tremendous enjoyment from being a sports spectator for some of the same reasons we enjoy fictions in books and in movies: Our extraordinary skills for imitation allow us to adopt a perspective within the situation we are observing and to think and feel from that perspective.

Oftentimes we are pulled into games and stories by means of our identification with a player or character. Remarkably, a person who is deeply engaged in this way will almost feel the dangers and triumphs and frustrations experienced by a story’s (or a game’s) hero as his or her own. This sort of identification is especially powerful when one of the heroes out there is little junior. But one can see the same thing among sports fans in general: they take the successes and failures of the home team as their own (just listen to how people talk, “we’re ahead 6-3”).

As one who loves watching sports—whether or not my child is out there—I now have to tell you something I wish wasn’t true. Sports spectatorship is an excellent example of what I call “the logic of entertainment.” By this term I refer to the fact that, in many areas of contemporary life, we can observe an increasing pressure for institutions and practices to become more entertaining or else disappear. I have written, for example, about how students in my college classes expect me to provide entertaining lectures, and the most popular teachers are often those who can combine their subject matter with an entertaining style of presentation. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with an entertaining teacher, but there may well be something wrong with an otherwise competent teacher who is let go because he or she is not entertaining and therefore attracts low enrollments.

These days we spend billions of dollars to provide high quality spectator sports, from elite athletes with contracts of hundreds of millions of dollars to children whose parents pay thousands worth dollars per season so that they can engage in highly competitive “travel teams.” In itself this wouldn’t be especially troubling, but just like with my college professor example, there’s an enormous downside to the excitement about elite athletics. This is that our system is increasingly oriented to producing elite athletes who can entertain us rather than providing sports opportunities for the majority of not particularly talented folks (like me). So, cities pass bond measures for one and a half-billion dollar sports arenas, but cut funding for parks and playgrounds. So, even at very young ages, kids are cut from school teams because there are only enough resources to focus on the most promising athletes. So, gym classes and intramurals are victims of budget cuts.

The same phenomenon can be observed in many areas of contemporary life: Entertainment can be fun and exciting, there’s nothing wrong with that. But when entertainment becomes the only thing we care about, it’s time to do some serious cultural soul-searching.

Photo by Jon Fife

A few weeks ago I flew to Denver with my younger daughter so that she could participate in a volleyball tournament; she has been travelling to tournaments for the last two years but this is the first time we had to fly. My daughter is 11 years old.

Shouldn’t my daughter be riding her bike around the neighborhood and jumping rope with her friends? Why is she, at age 11, playing on a team coached by a former Olympic-level athlete and competing against nationally-ranked teams based thousands of miles from our home? There is research to suggest that unstructured play and basic movement activities (running, jumping, balancing) are more beneficial for children of her age than specialized training in one particular sport. Why in the world should an 11 year old child be in year-round volleyball training? Well, let me explain.

I would guess that many readers who are older than 30 will share my own experience: at my daughter’s age and into my early teens, I spent every possible minute getting into pick-up games of basketball and football with my friends or just roaming around outside. This approach didn’t produce a skilled athlete, but it sure was fun (and cheap). Today, in most areas of the country, such activities are simply less available. One reason my daughter doesn’t head down to the park to play with her friends is that they aren’t there—they are at soccer practice, or piano lessons, or having pre-arranged play dates.

There has been a recent and enormous shift in the way children play in our society, away from unstructured outside play and towards organized competition under adult supervision. Why? One reason that will come quickly to mind is stranger danger. Many parents (including me, by the way) now believe it is unsafe for children—perhaps particularly girls—to be outside without adult supervision. Although neighborhoods vary, statistics that I have seen on this issue do not support the belief that in general accidents or attacks on children are more frequent now than, say, 30 years ago. It seems more likely that what has changed is extensive news coverage of issues such as attacks on children, which often fosters the belief that such events are frequent.

In short, actual danger from strangers is probably not the real reason for the decline in outside play. Well, how about this? Public funding for playgrounds, parks, and recreation centers has been declining since the 1980s. There aren’t as many places to go for public play anymore, and the ones that persist are likely not as well-maintained.

That’s relevant, but it still isn’t really at the heart of why my daughter plays highly competitive volleyball at such a young age. The fact is that if she doesn’t play now and decides to take up the sport at 14 or 15, the train will have left the station. Unless a child has extraordinary athletic gifts, she will be so far behind by that age that she will not be able to find a place on a team. It isn’t only that opportunities for unstructured public play have declined, it’s that opportunities for highly competitive play have expanded to such an extent that in some sports that is all that exists. There are simply no possibilities in my part of the country for recreational volleyball for children 10-18. And the situation is similar for many other sports as well: our focus on producing highly competitive teams with highly skilled participants leads to a lack of focus on producing opportunities for children who simply want to play a sport casually.

This, I think, gets us close to probably the most important reason that highly competitive sport for the few has begun to replace recreational sport for the many among children today. We as a society don’t care about recreational sport for the many. The logic of entertainment has come to control youth sports. Parents, kids, and the society as a whole are excited by the possibility of championships, cheering spectators, and (for the really elite) media coverage. And we aren’t really excited by our children playing disorganized touch football until they have to come in for dinner. What’s the point of that? Nobody is watching.

This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the way our society works. I really wish my kids could play pick up games and intramurals the way their not-so-athletically-talented dad did. But the intramurals and pick up games are far fewer now. Strangely enough, childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed as they have faded. Or maybe that’s not strange at all.

(This post reflects on issues I have been thinking about for years, but it is also heavily influenced by a recent book called Game On by ESPN writer Tom Farrey).