Body Image and Quitting Sports

In the past you’ve heard me say that roughly seventy-percent of our kids who play organized sports drop out by the age of thirteen. One of the main reasons cited is the pressure they feel from parents and coaches, a pressure that becomes unbearable and which drains the fun out of playing the sport. Now that we live in a social media saturated world, there seems to be a new reason for our kids to drop out of sports. A recent survey found that kids are dropping out due to the fact that they don’t think their bodies measure up to the idealized athletic body types they are seeing on social media. Researchers found that kids who had concluded they didn’t have the right body were defining the right body by what they saw on TikTok and Instagram. Not surprisingly this reason for dropping out was cited more often by our girls than by our boys. Parents, we need to promote the value of Godly character over body type, and we need to encourage our kids to play and have fun.