Early dropout of children and youth from sports – International perspective and societal backgrounds

Abstract

Sport and physical activities of children are essential in forming their health, personality, society and other factors which affect their future life either directly or indirectly. Their life attitudes are shaped by experience, and one of domains that can be affected in them for ever based on positive or negative experience is physical activity and relation thereto. Significance and awareness of this societal problem currently lead to activities which are to support sports and physical movement of children and youth. Efforts focused on the prevention of early dropout of children from sports are in the interest of kinanthropological research studies, national children’s sports support programmes where the issue often becomes part of political and programme statements of governments, civic and non-profit organizations and sports associations. In spite of all these efforts, however, we still face a massive dropout of children from sports, which is not replaced with an adequate alternative physical activity. Consequences of the negative, and sometimes even toxic experience with physical activity at early age lasts until adulthood, which brings a range of personal, health and social problems. Possibilities for reducing the phenomenon consist in systematic work dealing with the support and improvement of coaching procedures which will be focused more on the needs of children and diverted from the traditional perception of coaching education focused primarily on the needs of coaches, on the building of positive relationship with parents as partners in the process of physical education of children, and on extending the range of physical activities for children also in the environment of non-competitive sports.