Highlighting the microlevel of the family to grapple with contemporary social issues at the macrolevel of society, this volume charts new territory to advance a valuable understanding of family and sport issues.

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards 2022 A close look at how big money and high stakes have transformed youth sports, turning once healthy, fun activities for kids into all-consuming endeavors—putting stress on children and families alike Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than to develop their characters or build healthy habits. What happened to kids' sports? And how can we make them fun again? In Take Back the Game, coach and journalist Linda Flanagan reveals how the youth sports industry capitalizes on parents’ worry about their kids’ futures, selling the idea that more competitive play is essential in the feeding frenzy over access to colleges and universities. Drawing on her experience as a coach and a parent, along with research and expert analysis, Flanagan delves into a national obsession that has: Compelled kids to specialize year-round in one sport. Increased the risk of both physical injury and mental health problems. Encouraged egregious behavior by coaches and parents. Reduced access to sports for low-income families. A provocative and timely entrant into a conversation thousands of parents are having on the sidelines, Take Back the Game uncovers how youth sports became a serious business, the consequences of raising the stakes for kids and parents alike--and the changes we need now.

In The Sport Marriage, Steven M. Ortiz draws on studies he conducted over nearly three decades that focus on the marital realities confronted by women married to male professional athletes. These women, who are usually portrayed in unflattering and/or unrealistic terms, face enormous challenges in their attempts to establish and maintain functional marital and family lives while the husband routinely puts his career first. Ortiz defines the traditional sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, illustrating how it encourages women to contribute to their own subordination through adherence to an unwritten rulebook and a repertoire of self-management strategies. He explains how they make invaluable contributions to their husbands’ careers while adjusting to public life and trying to maintain family privacy, managing power and control issues, and coping with pervasive groupies, overinvolved mothers, a culture of infidelity, and husbands who prioritize team loyalty. He gives these historically silent women a voice, offering readers perceptive and sensitive insight into what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports.

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child’s Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child’s Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports. Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child’s Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people—and with them, the future of our society.

This book examines the tensions and ambivalences which men encounter as they negotiate contemporary expectations of fatherhood and fulfill their own expectations of what it means to be a ‘good’ father. There is little doubt that today’s fathers are responding to new expectations about fatherhood and fathering practices. The remote, detached, breadwinning father of the past, once lauded as a masculine ideal, has faded, and men are now expected to be ‘involved’, ‘intimate’, ‘caring’ and ‘domesticated’ fathers. Using a family practices lens and a case study of sport, Fletcher elucidates the changes and continuities in family and fathering practices in different historical periods and contexts. Negotiating Fatherhood will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in family and fathering practices, sport, leisure, and gender.

Today, in a world quite different from the one that existed just thirty years ago, both girls and boys play soccer, baseball, softball, and other youth sports. Yet has the dramatic surge in participation by girls contributed to greater gender equality? In this engaging study, leading sociologist Michael A. Messner probes the richly complex gender dynamics of youth sports. Weaving together vivid first-person interviews with his own experiences as a volunteer for his sons' teams, Messner finds that despite the movement of girls into sports, gender boundaries and hierarchies still dominate, especially among the adults who run youth sports. His book widens into a provocative exploration of why youth sports matter—how they play a profound role in shaping gender, class, family, and community.

Through a social justice and equity lens, this book examines how families, sport, and leisure connect to broader social issues in society. It goes beyond describing oppression and disadvantaged identities and focuses on advocacy and ways forward to challenge the status quo. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws upon different theories to present important new work on topics as diverse as the role of parents and siblings within youth sport; the family in sport for development and peace; and grandparent–grandchild relationships in sport, leisure, and family tourism. Several topics also bring attention to the multiplicity of family lives such as LGBTQ older adults as well as children and young people in the care of the state. Together, these studies provide important insight into how sport and leisure reflect and refract key contemporary social issues within the context of familial lives. This is fascinating reading for any student or researcher with an interest in sport, leisure, education, development, sociology, social work, or social policy.