Marie Kondo fever has taken over the United States.
If you haven't caught the fever yet, don't worry, it's likely working its way to you. The fever is quite contagious and the concepts are universal: only keep what you need and keep it simple. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary clutter -- don't hold onto more than you need. Accomplishing that is a different story, however. While the concepts are simple, they are by no means easy to implement.
For starters, it requires you to let go. To throw out the thing you've been holding onto for so many years, despite not having many reasons to keep it. Maybe it's an old table that doesn't fit quite right in your living room, a shirt that you've held onto from college, or a baseball card collection that sits in your basement (becoming a haven for your little basement bugs).
Letting go was, and still is, really hard.
We had moderate success implementing these concepts in our house, even if there was a little more crying than expected (my tears, yes, as well as those of my kids). The end result was quite beautiful, however. We spend less time cleaning because we have less stuff to clean (and for us, it's that simple). The experience, and success we had, made me wonder we could extend these concepts to other corners of our lives.
Youth sports in my area is bananas. I'm too polite to ask my friends and neighbors why they sign their kids up for so many sports, but most folks I know have their kids doing 2 sports a season. I struggle with this because I think youth sports are tremendously important for developing children. The research is abundant -- the benefits of youth sports are proven. However, can there be too much of a good thing? And I'd say yes.
In fact, our friend Marie Kondo, and those principles of simplification, would argue yes, as well.
To be clear, I am not arguing for a one-sport specialization. I'm arguing that, if anything, your kid does 1 sport per season, no matter what it is. In our house, we tend to do baseball in the Fall and Spring, basketball in the winter, and a variety of camps and sports in the summer. Are we shuttling around from practice to practice and game to game? Yes. But what we're trying to avoid here is the over-scheduled child. We may have 1 practice a week and 1 game a week, but the child is free to have "unscheduled" time on the other 5 days. That can include playing pickup sports in the backyard, building Legos, reading, projects, and frankly, whatever else the kid wants to do. And maybe even figuring out how to overcome boredom on their own.
The over-scheduled child is a thing and while we all sometimes joke about it, the implications are fairly serious. Depression. Anxiety. Problem-solving issues. The argument here isn't that there is a one-size-fits-all-solution to this problem. But one of the potential solutions is to cut down on the over-scheduling. Less can absolutely be more.
Again, this is not an argument for one-sport specialization. It's still not clear whether one-sport specialization works or is better for your athlete in the long run. The argument here is for 1 sport per season (and maybe even just one activity per season) to save your sanity and your child's sanity and, quite possibly, a more rewarding experience.