Children's Rights and Sports Coaching

Abstract

Concern about children's rights in sport emerged in part as a Cold War concern about the sporting success, based on an emerging system of early talent identification and development; and in part because of the rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s of organised sports for children in North America. Concerns were increasingly expressed about unqualified coaches, the treatment of children as adults, and the maltreatment of child participants. Various initiatives were introduced regarding the need for qualified coaching, and the need for 'children to be children', but they met with little success. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gave some force to the arguments, but despite an ongoing critique and a growing number of abuses – especially sexual abuse – and related scandals involving children in sport, attempts to regulate the behaviour of adults involved in children's sports have failed. That now seems to be changing as Norway and Sweden have begun to enforce children's rights as a principle for children's involvement in sport; and other countries are advocating for mechanisms that are independent of sport organisations to prevent the abuse of athletes. Both of these changes have real implications for the practices of coaches and sport administrators, and the way that children are treated in sport. In particular, these changes are increasingly pointing to the need for an approach to children's sport that is rights-based and developmentally appropriate.