Where Does Childhood Fit?

A mother writing on the blog Diary of a Tennis Mom laid out a week a lot of tennis families will recognize. Her twelve-year-old son trains before school, goes to school, does fitness and a second tennis session afterward, and then does homework with whatever is left of the evening. Weekends often belong to tournaments and the driving between them. She wasn't bragging about how much he could handle, and she wasn't blaming anybody. She was asking out loud a question plenty of families only ask themselves: where does childhood fit?

The advice a question like that tends to draw is about balance. Protect one day a week, and skip the tournament before the one that matters. I've handed out versions of that advice myself. It all starts from the same place, though. The week is already built, and the job now is to make it livable.

What stopped me was one word in her question.

*Fit* assumes the schedule is the container and childhood is the thing being packed into it. Tennis and school stake their claims first, and the kid gets whatever space is left between them. Before we help a family get more efficient at living inside that arrangement, I want to know who decided the arrangement was necessary, and what it would take to change their mind.

I don't know this family. I don't know what her son wants or what his coaches have weighed. I'm also not asking from the outside. I've been in the business of developing young players since 1992, and I've built plenty of weeks that look a lot like this one. I've asked for more court time, or a few hundred more reps of something that wasn't holding up yet. Each of those requests made sense while I was looking straight at the thing I wanted to fix. What I didn't always look at was the total, and the child is the one who has to live through the sum of our individually reasonable decisions.

Every adult around a junior player can explain their piece, and most of them are looking at one part of the week. The child is the only one who has to show up for all of it. Being right about your own piece doesn't solve that. A useful session can still be badly placed in a kid's day, and a worthwhile tournament can still be one too many in a given month. Somebody has to look at the whole life, with the child in the conversation, instead of trusting the pieces to add up because each one comes with a good explanation.

I've argued for a long time that young athletes should pursue sport and school together, not one instead of the other. I still believe it. Her son's week reminds me of something I probably didn't say loudly enough. Doing both isn't the same as stacking. Piling tennis, fitness and travel on top of school gives a child both, technically, the way an overstuffed suitcase technically holds everything. Making it work takes design, which means deciding what each piece is for and what we're willing to leave out.

We've also gotten too comfortable using the schedule as proof of development. We know how many hours a player logged and how many days they trained this week. Those numbers are easy to count. They don't tell us what the player learned, or whether the learning was worth what the session cost them.

If a player spends an afternoon following instructions and getting corrected, we've watched activity. We may have watched learning too, but we ought to be able to name what changed, and for the tennis part, the test is whether it shows up when the score matters and nobody's handing them the answer. Some of this takes time, and some benefits are hard to pin down by Friday. That uncertainty should make us careful about what we claim. It shouldn't become a standing excuse for never explaining why we keep asking for more.

Junior tennis is much better at asking what happens if we add a session than what happens if we take one away. Adding feels like doing something about the problem. Removing feels like giving up, even when nobody has shown the session is doing what we think it does.

I've seen the other question asked on purpose. In the mid-1990s in Atlanta, Danny Carlson and I deliberately kept his son Chad's court hours below what a lot of Chad's competition was logging. Chad explained the thinking himself in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution interview: keep the hours down so he could peak in college and beyond instead of running out in the juniors. He climbed into the top five nationally in the Boys 18s. I don't offer that as proof that fewer hours work, since one player can't carry that much weight. What I'd point to is that somebody designed Chad's week, could explain why it looked the way it did, and knew what they were trying to protect.

Suppose a family and a coach agree to take one session out for a few weeks. Before they do, they name what they're worried about losing and what they hope the change makes room for, and the player gets a say in both. It's the same loop I use for everything else: set an intention, run the experience, debrief it honestly, adjust. If the player comes back more engaged, or simply gets an afternoon he looks forward to, that's information. If something important slips, that's information too, though we still have to be careful about blaming every change on the one thing we moved. Either way, our assumptions finally get a chance to be wrong. Without that, "this is what serious players do" becomes both the reason for the schedule and the shield against looking at it. There's always another serious player somewhere doing more, which tells us nothing about this one.

She also asked when her son gets to see friends, play, rest or have an afternoon with nothing on it. Those aren't leftovers. A child doesn't stop becoming a person when the organized training ends. There are friendships to work out and interests to stumble into in the parts of life nobody has assigned yet. I'm not going to defend every free afternoon by explaining how it might someday help the forehand, because that keeps tennis in charge of the conversation. A kid is allowed to want something because it matters to him, whether or not anybody can connect it to a ranking. If we say we're developing the whole person, we have to be able to recognize value that never comes back to us as a tennis result.

We should also ask the child about the life we're building for him. Which session does he actually like? What part of the week does he look forward to? What would he drop, and what would he keep even if nobody made him? Some of those answers should change the plan.

This is where adults find out whether they meant the question. If a child says he wants less tennis and we immediately explain why that answer shows a lack of commitment, we've taught him something about honesty, and it isn't what we intended. We may still get his agreement afterward, though I wouldn't treat that as proof that he wants the plan.

A twelve-year-old shouldn't design the whole week or carry every consequence. Adults bring experience and judgment he doesn't have yet. Including him means more than showing him the finished plan and asking if he's excited, though. It means leaving something undecided long enough for his answer to count.

How we read practice deserves the same scrutiny. A player who looks tired may be tired, but "looks tired" is already a judgment. What did we actually see? Maybe he was late to the ball or slower than usual to answer. Before that turns into a conclusion about effort or motivation, it's worth looking at what we asked him to do and what else his day already held. I've gotten more interested in measuring the adult side of these arrangements: how often we add something compared with how often we take something away, and how often we ask a player a question whose answer could actually change the plan. We spend a lot of energy evaluating the child and very little examining the decisions built around him.

None of this means hard is the same as badly designed. Learning is frustrating sometimes, and a kid may gladly give up one good thing to chase another. The question is whether the adults can explain the demand and still hear the player when his experience doesn't match our explanation.

She closes by reminding readers that before they're athletes, they're children. I understand what she's protecting. I'd move one word. They're children while they're athletes. The experience we design for them isn't happening somewhere outside their childhood. It is their childhood, or a big piece of it.

That makes the question bigger than finding a few empty hours. What is he learning about work, and about whether the adults around him can handle an honest answer? What relationships is he building? What kind of life does this pursuit give him now, while the future we're planning for is still a guess?

I don't have a universal number of training hours to offer, and one mother's account wouldn't justify prescribing one for her son. I do have a question for those of us who help build the week. If we were starting from scratch, would we build this arrangement for this child? If the answer is yes, we ought to be able to say why, and what would make us reconsider. If the answer is no, then teaching the family how to fit childhood around it isn't our next job.

*Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.*