Sam is fourteen years old. He spends hardly any time with friends or family. Every day, before or after school, or both, and every weekend, he trains and competes in matches. He rarely goes to social events; he doesn’t even walk home from school with friends. He keeps up with his schoolwork, but he has little interest in it, and his academic performance is below average. Instead, he dreams of being a footballer.
“Sam” could be any one of thousands upon thousands of children who aspire, and often are pushed, to achieve success as professional athletes. Their lives, and often the lives of their parent(s), revolve almost entirely around this goal. It is standard for these children to practice for sixteen or more hours a week, with many hitting the mid-to-high twenties. A notable recent trend is that this is happening at an earlier age. A standard Saturday for a pair of seven-year-old twins involves playing three ice hockey games and training for two hours at four different ice rinks. At a prestigious under-twelve ice hockey team, the oldest that a member started training was seven. Some members started training by the age of two, and all but two of them by the age of five. There are world golfing competitions for children under the age of six. Children spend their entire summer holiday playing the kid-golf circuit.
The underlying message is a common one: you must maximize your talent, which requires almost exclusive commitment from an increasingly young age. Note that this is very different to developing one’s talents. We all strive to be better at things. I am focused on the highly demanding process of maximizing talent. Furthermore, my discussion focuses on sport, but much of what is said applies to other domains, such as music, dance, and chess. Sport is simply the starkest example of a wider issue.
Whilst some of these children may find this talent-maximization intrinsically enjoyable, a significant motivation and justification for it is the rewards of success. Elite athletes earn almost unimaginable sums of money. Many of them enjoy an almost-unrivaled level of fame and admiration. Furthermore, children often idolize individuals who have succeeded, and they dream of emulating them. Finally, one may simply think it important that a person develop their abilities as much as possible (we ought to fulfill our true potential). Given this, to what extent should parents encourage, or even force, their children onto the professional talent-maximization treadmill?
The nature and value of childhood
In answering this question, we need to think about both the nature of childhood and what makes for a “good” childhood. On the latter point, here is a non-exhaustive list of commonly identified childhood goods:
- Unstructured, imaginative play
- A lack of significant responsibility
- Considerable free time
- Play and carefreeness
- Relationships with other children and with adults
Talent-maximization erodes all of these, often quite substantially. The demands of training result in very little free time. This impacts the ability to play with other children and develop meaningful relationships with them. The activity itself quickly ceases to be a hobby or “fun” and instead becomes defined by extreme competitiveness and is dominated by a pressure to succeed. Winning becomes all important, thus intensifying the pain of defeat. It also turns sporting peers into rivals, hindering the development of supportive peer relationships.
Children’s relationships with their parents can also be damaged, as they are seen more as coaches, who must be obeyed and not disappointed, rather than parents, whose support is unconditional. Well-known cases of deeply abusive parents, such as Tanya Harding and Jelena Dokic, are merely the extreme tip of the relationship-erosion iceberg.
All of this is evident in the childhoods described by many successful athletes themselves (an excellent example being an interview that the footballer Trent Alexander-Arnold gave with the Guardian). In short, there is a substantial loss of much that makes childhood “good.” As a parent of the seven-year-old ice hockey twins mentioned above wondered, “‘Let kids be kids? Is that possible anymore?”
Understanding childhood
One’s assessment of the above will depend, in part, on their view of the nature of childhood itself. Patrick Tomlin has provided a nice way of conceptualizing this. The “sapling” view of childhood sees children as simply adults in development, and hence as inferior versions of adults (as a sapling is inferior to a mighty tree). On this view, the purpose of childhood is to ensure children develop successfully into adults. Childhood itself has little, if any, intrinsic value. People who hold something like this view may be little troubled by the apparent losses of childhood goods, as the end of achieving professional success can justify the means.
In contrast, the “fruit” view considers childhood to be superior to adulthood. There is something especially wonderful about it, which is lost as we transition into adults (just as fruit rots, i.e., worsens, as it ages). Adherents to this perspective will be deeply troubled by talent-maximization. It causes children to miss out on the best part of their lives.
A third view is the “caterpillar” view, according to which childhood and adulthood are fundamentally different kinds of things, neither of which is better than the other (just as the caterpillar and butterfly are fundamentally distinct). It will assert that the loss of childhood goods is bad because childhood is valuable, but it is not committed to an account of how valuable it is. What it will insist is that the costs of talent-maximization are real losses, which cannot be compensated for by goods enjoyed in adulthood. If this is right, then talent-maximization is bad for the child simpliciter, even if one still thinks that it can be justified.
One in a million
Regardless of one’s view of childhood and its relative value, it is important to be aware of the odds of children achieving sporting success. For example, it has been estimated that in the United States, the odds of a child making a living as an athlete are roughly one in 13,333. According to a 2016 study, one in 4,233 high school American football players will be drafted to the professional league. For men’s basketball, the figure is one in 11,771, for women’s basketball it is one in 13,015, and for men’s baseball it is one in 659, and for men’s ice hockey it is one in 598. Data from ten years ago showed that the percentage of male United States college athletes who became professional was 1.7% for American football, 1.3% for ice hockey, and 1.2% for baseball. It is reasonable to assume that today’s percentages are even smaller. The situation is similar for many other sports. To have anything approaching a financially viable career in tennis, one needs to be amongst the world’s top one hundred players or so. The odds of becoming a successful footballer in the United Kingdom and elsewhere are almost zero.
In short, the odds of making it professionally in many sports are staggeringly low. Even when one is successful, the length of one’s career is typically very short. The average career in America’s National Football League is 3.3 years, and the average English football league career is around 8 years. This means that almost all children engaged in talent-maximization are sacrificing significant childhood goods for extremely improbable and short-lived professional success.
Finally, the impact of “failing” is also often underappreciated. The example of Jeremy Witsen, who took his own life at age seventeen after being released from Manchester City’s academy, is a stark demonstration of how hard it can be to dedicate one’s childhood to something that ultimately does not work out.
Feeding the machine
Despite all of this, there is a strong societal demand for excellence. We are encouraged to make the most of our abilities, to fulfil our potential, to crave to be the best. Furthermore, many of us want professional athletes and the like to be the very best they can be. The better that people are at things, well, the better. Amazing dancers, tennis players, footballers, pianists, and the like are often only amazing precisely because their childhood was dedicated to maximizing their talent.
Meanwhile, the increasing financial and social rewards of success in these arenas will no doubt drive many parents and children down the path of talent-maximization, regardless of its impact on childhood. The arms race of youth development thus shows little sign of abating. The problem is so significant that elite sport has been described as a form of child labor.
Given this, it is incumbent on authorities and governing bodies to implement restrictions and regulations on the training of children, such as raising the age they can enter academies, capping the hours they can spend at them and de-emphasizing competition. Whilst some positive steps are being taken in this regard—the French football system being a good example—there is always the danger that determined parents find other ways to secure a competitive edge for their child, for example, by hiring private coaches. The ultimate solution, then, may lie in providing parents with the knowledge and understanding to make decisions that ensure children enjoy a sufficiently good childhood, even if this may hinder their chances of sporting (or other) success later in life.
Paddy McQueen
Paddy McQueen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Swansea University. He has a wide range of research interests, especially within ethics and social philosophy. His recent publications include Regret(OUP, 2025) and Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction(Polity, 2023, co-authored with Elisa Magrì).
