Child's Play: Sport in Kids' Worlds

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Michael A. Messner, Michela Musto
Rutgers University Press, May 1, 2016 - Sports & Recreation - 268 pages
Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child’s Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child’s Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports.  Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child’s Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people—and with them, the future of our society.  
 

Contents

Michael A Messner and Michela Musto
1962
Part I
1976
What We Know and What
1985
Limited
2003
Girls and the Racialization of Female Bodies in Sport Contexts
1992
Sport and the Childhood Obesity Epidemic
2016
The NFL Corporate Social
2006
The Contextual
1990
Physical Activity Experiences of East
Transgender and GenderNonconforming Kids and the Binary
I Dont
Community Heads Creating
Kids Sport Research and Sport Policy
Index
Copyright

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About the author (2016)

MICHAEL A. MESSNER is a professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of several books, including It’s All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports and Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women.  

MICHELA MUSTO is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society and Sociology of Sport Journal

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