Netflix is showing all the Hunger Games movies in anticipation of the second prequel come out in theaters. I first read the Suzanne Collins’s series as a young adult, so of course, I imagined myself as one of the main characters, i.e. Katniss. Now, as a mom folding laundry, I am rewatching them from the perspective of a parent. 

Metaphorically, I feel like our society has moved to a place where we have our children compete to a degree beyond what is healthy for them. 

All the summer in between different little clubs and camps that I’ve signed up the kids for, my seven-year-old has been going to Outpost. If you’re not familiar, Outpost a program that the city runs where they hire high school kids to be in charge of a wagon-load of balls and hula hoop for the children to play with at the city parks. It’s a drop-in program so the parents can just drop by with the kids and hang out while they play. 

I have been especially charmed by watching the kids play soccer in the field. It’s organized on the spot with however many kids they have. They run up and down the field, kicking a ball and laughing and having a great time. There’s no uniforms or teams, and boys and girls play together. It is so refreshing after all of the fierce competition that we keep encountering at younger and younger ages. 

My oldest daughter danced down at the Hillsboro Dance Center for five years. She dropped out after fifth grade, not because she didn’t like to dance anymore, but because the competition became fiercer and the demands on her little body outpaced her. She couldn’t do the splits, and the older girls told her if she couldn’t do the splits to not bother moving forward in jazz dance. She was ten.

So, she switched to swimming where she worked her way all the way up through the levels at the local pool and tryouts for the swim team. At eleven years old, they had her swimming two hours every single evening and the competitions were very demanding. 

She dropped out and came back at 13. It was even worse with practice from 6-8 p.m. weeknights and Saturday mornings. She was nervous at the competitions because it was easy to get disqualified for the tiniest infractions in the water. We ended up at the pediatrician, getting her counseling for anxiety. She quit the team and the anxiety floated away.

She is now getting ready to attend high school this fall. She is interested in playing softball because we attended a girl’s spring softball game that she enjoyed it very much. She’s been practicing in the backyard with wiffle balls. I called the school to find out about what playing at the school would involve, and the staff member informed me that softball was a tryout-only sport.

All of the doctors and nurses and pediatricians have been drilling parents to get their kids off of screens and out on a playing field. But what they don’t seem to realize is that it’s so hard these days to just have fun and play sports.  Everything seems like a massive competition all of the time. 

I played volleyball with a church league and slow-pitch softball in city league and we had a good time. When they say that baseball is our national past time, it used to mean that people played games together as a community after work. Now athletics have morphed into entertainment for the rich in lounge chairs watching elite young people killing themselves on a field.