• Posted June 20, 2025

Parents Are Pouring More Time, Money Into Youth Sports

FRIDAY, June 20, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Harried parents aren’t wrong to suspect something’s changed in what is expected of them when it comes to their children’s sports activities, a new study says.

Modern-day parents are spending more time, money and resources on their kids’ sports activities than moms and dads from previous generations, researchers report.

“We’ve heard these stories about how parents are spending so much time going to their kids’ athletic events, spending more money, going all in — but it wasn’t clear if these were just stories,” senior researcher Chris Bjork, a professor of education at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said in a news release.

“Now we have some empirical evidence that parents aren’t wrong about this,” he continued. “Things have changed.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 4,000 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey, a poll sponsored by Ohio State University’s Sports and Society Initiative. Participants from all 50 states answered the survey online between fall 2018 and spring 2019. 

They were asked about how often their parents attended their athletic events and how much money their parents spent on their sports participation in a typical year, when they were growing up.

Results show a pattern of increasing parental involvement in children’s sports, especially among parents with higher education.

Most participants born in the 1950s said their parents attended their sporting events a few times a year, results show.

But those born in the 1990s said parents with a college degree came to kids’ matches about once a week on average, and those with lower levels of education about once a month.

Similar generational trends were found in how much parents spent on youth sports, and how much they supported their kids’ participation through things like coaching or providing transportation.

Many of the changes seemed to accelerate beginning for children born in the 1980s, results indicate.

“Recent changes in youth sport and parenting cultures have prompted parents to invest more time and money in their children’s athletic activities,” said lead researcher Chris Knoester, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University in Columbus.

“Since the 1980s, supporting a child’s athletic development has appeared to have required levels – or at least felt pressures – of involvement not demanded of parents in previous generations,” Knoester added in a news release.

These changes have corresponded with societal shifts that emphasize “intensive parenting,” Bjork said.

“There’s been this intensification of parenting over the past 50 years or so that has seen a shift of parents from casual supporters to managers of their kids’ extracurricular lives,” Bjork said.

This has been caused in part because schools have cut back on sports spending, prompting families who are better off to pour more resources into their kids’ athletic success, researchers said.

“Parents see this as a way to enhance their kids’ resumes as they are applying for college or trying to get a job,” Knoester said.

“It has been this convergence of an increased emphasis on intensive parenting, reduced public support for sports participation and a stark rise in a mostly privatized youth sports industry,” he said. “It has all led to higher levels of parents’ involvement in their children’s sports participation.”

The new study appears in the journal Leisure/Loisir.

More information

The Association for Applied Sports Psychology has more on youth sports parents.

SOURCE: Ohio State University, news release, June 12, 2025