Intensive parenting and elite sports children

- an ethnographic study of concerted cultivation in two Danish elite football clubs

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of talent environments in two Danish elite football clubs, we propose to rethink parents’ contribution to talent development. With a term from Annette Lareau, we examine the corporation between parents and football professionals as a special kind of concerted cultivation. The dual career literature advocates that talent environments provide parallel developmental tracks that allow athletes to become whole sportspeople. However, the analysis shows that parents and clubs only manage to concert the cultivation of the young boys in terms of the sporting ambition and the formal participation in a youth education, whereas the task of developing whole sportspeople rests solely on the parents. Based on the study, we argue that there is a need to evaluate the way dual careers are done in practice and to consider how to incorporate parents’ perspectives on talent development to accomplish the aim of dual career policies.

Based on an ethnographic study of talent environments in two Danish elite football clubs, we propose to rethink parents’ contribution to talent development. With a term from Annette Lareau, we examine the corporation between parents and football professionals as a special kind of concerted cultivation. The dual career literature advocates that talent environments provide parallel developmental tracks that allow athletes to become whole sportspeople. However, the analysis shows that parents and clubs only manage to concert the cultivation of the young boys in terms of the sporting ambition and the formal participation in a youth education, whereas the task of developing whole sportspeople rests solely on the parents. Based on the study, we argue that there is a need to evaluate the way dual careers are done in practice and to consider how to incorporate parents’ perspectives on talent development to accomplish the aim of dual career policies.

Keywords:

Intensive parenting, concerted cultivation, elite sport, talent development, football, boys, ethnography.