Parents debate whether rise in competitive youth sports has led to decline in children's physical fitness: 'I hear they're doing tryouts for 3rd graders now'

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Emmy Pratt • Senior Editor
Sep 5, 2025 11:00 AM EDT

We've all heard the line, "Kids never play outside anymore. All they do is stay indoors and scroll on their phones." While phones and an ever-increasing parental paranoia about safety outside the home keep kids from going outside and throwing around the old pigskin, there might be some other reasons kids today are not as physically fit as they could be. 

If you've ever been an unathletic kid, you know that the prospect of joining sports can be scary and uncertain. If you live in a town with 1000 people, the high school basketball team probably wouldn't cut you, even if you were objectively unathletic. However, if you live in a community with a high population where competitive sports are highly valued, you may not feel encouraged to try out unless you've been playing the sport since elementary school. There isn't always a place in sports and various extracurricular activities for kids who want to participate for fun, and that's not right. Hyper-competitive environments might help the kids who are the best of the best. Still, if a kid feels horrible about being mediocre at soccer because their coach takes it way too seriously, they're not going to want to continue playing. It's better to be okay at a sport than to forego athletics altogether. 

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sports PE kids youth sports bad parenting sport baseball parenting youth soccer little kids football competitive physical education Parenting Fail parents children
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