Do Children Still Have Childhoods? In the past few weeks, I have seen a number of articles in magazines and newspapers talking about the way of life for today's pre-teens and teens. This article, from the New York Times, details the intense world of youth hockey. The article describes how a team of 11-year olds practices year-round and plays in tournaments across the country, often playing multiple games in one day. I have seen other stories about select soccer, year-round swimming and other sports which force children to "specialize" when they should be playing pick-up games in the neighborhood.



And what for? Becoming even a collegiate athlete is difficult; making it to the pros is almost too distant a possibility to even be discussed. Do these kids really want to be playing one sport all of the time and traveling the nation on holidays and weekends? Or is it the parents, consumed by the child's abilities and determined that they (the children? the parents?) will succeed. Either way, I for one would like to see a cultural shift that returns some of the innocence and spontaneity to childhood -- to see more pick-up games than select nationwide tournaments. Hopefully, this is not just a pipe dream, but I suppose time will tell.

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