By: B. M. Ryan
Recent scholarship in sport studies increasingly invokes the language of children’s rights, human development, and ethical responsibility to critique performance-oriented youth sport. A recent article by Matthews et al., for example, argues that youth sport should be reorganized around play, development, and children’s rights rather than performance imperatives.[1] While such claims are normatively attractive, they illustrate a broader and persistent problem in the literature: the tendency to treat legal protection as if it flows automatically from moral aspiration, rather than from enforceable legal doctrine.[2]
Much of the contemporary appeal of “children’s rights” discourse in sport draws, often implicitly, on a strain of Romantic individualism traceable, in part to Emerson and Thoreau: the belief that authentic development emerges from inward truth, resistance to conformity, and fidelity to an inner moral compass rather than to external rules. This tradition prizes the invisible over the institutional, the inward over the administered. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captured the sentiment succinctly: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”[3] Yet, this philosophical inheritance, however resonant, becomes analytically unstable when imported into legal critique without mediation. Law does not operate on inward essence, authenticity, or moral intuition; it operates on observable conduct, institutional authority, and enforceable duties. To invoke invisibility, authenticity, or inner flourishing as though they themselves generate legal constraints risks collapsing moral aspiration into juridical claim. The Emersonian insistence that truth precedes rule may inspire resistance to conformity, but it cannot substitute for legal analysis of power, consent, and governance. In the context of youth sport, the danger is not that scholars value what is “invisible,” but that they mistake moral insight for legal mechanism—treating inward ideals as though they themselves impose obligations on institutions that, in law, remain governed by structure rather than sentiment
This distinction matters. Law does not operate through values alone. It operates through standards, duties, doctrines, and remedies. When scholars critique youth sport without engaging those structures, they risk misunderstanding both how harm arises and how protection could actually be achieved.
I. Performance Is Not the Legal Problem
Much of the contemporary critique of youth sport assumes that performance orientation itself is ethically suspect. Yet performance, measurement, hierarchy, and evaluation are not aberrations; they are constitutive features of organized sport. Athletes are necessarily differentiated by skill, assigned roles, evaluated against standards, and subject to unequal outcomes. These features are not accidental distortions but structural conditions of collective athletic practice.
To treat performance as inherently unethical collapses description into condemnation. It also obscures the legal reality that performance itself does not generate liability.
Law does not prohibit evaluation, competition, or hierarchy. What it regulates are relationships of power, consent, and harm.[4]
This distinction is where much of the sport-studies literature, including the article under discussion, loses analytical footing.
II. The Misplaced Appeal to “Necessity”
Implicit in many critiques is an assumption that youth sport justifies harmful practices through claims of necessity: that intense training, sacrifice, or discipline are “required” to succeed. The article gestures toward this logic but never specifies its legal implications.
In law, necessity has a precise and narrow meaning. In Regina v. Dudley & Stephens, the court rejected necessity as a defense for killing, holding that moral pressure or survival logic does not excuse otherwise unlawful conduct.[5] The doctrine stands for a broader principle: necessity does not legitimize harm simply because the actor believes it unavoidable or beneficial.
This abstract principle can be illustrated by a concrete scenario: When a ten-year-old hockey goalie decides, minutes before practice, that he no longer wishes to play, scholars may instinctively frame this as an exercise of rights. Legally, however, children are incapable of binding consent under common law doctrines of incapacity. Necessity doctrine does not convert a child’s preference into an enforceable claim against adults or institutions. Instead, the relevant question is whether adults’ imposition of participation constitutes procedural unconscionability: did the child face unfair pressure, opaque expectations, or restricted exit options? This shifts the analysis from ‘autonomy’ to structure and governance—the child’s welfare is protected not through direct rights to refuse, but through mechanisms that mitigate coercion and imbalance.
Children cannot unilaterally refuse mandatory activities, whether hockey, music, or school. Further, the idea that a child could assert a legal right to refuse sport participation has no precedent. Compulsory schooling, for example, is enforceable against a child’s objection; parents and state authorities are charged with ensuring attendance. By analogy, a child cannot unilaterally refuse music lessons, organized art, or athletic practice without adult mediation. Claims that children should have ‘rights to opt out’ of sport exceed existing legal doctrine. Courts, in essence, treat the child’s welfare as mediated through structured adult supervision rather than through autonomous choice.
The crucial point: youth sport is not protected—or condemned—by necessity doctrine at all. The law does not treat children as autonomous actors choosing to accept risks under conditions of necessity. Instead, it treats them as legally incapable of consent.
Thus, the relevant legal question is not whether performance demands are “necessary,” but whether adults may impose them given children’s legal status.
III. Children Cannot Consent, and That Changes the Analysis
Children lack contractual capacity. As a matter of black-letter law, they cannot meaningfully consent to binding agreements or waive rights. Participation in organized sport is therefore structurally unilateral. Adults design the systems, define the terms, and control access.
Courts have long recognized that unilateral or adhesion arrangements are not automatically unconscionable, even when bargaining power is unequal.[6] But, enforceability is not the same as ethical legitimacy.
This distinction is precisely where much sports scholarship falters. It treats children as quasi-autonomous moral agents while ignoring the legal reality that they are structurally dependent participants whose “choices” are mediated by parents, institutions, and markets.[7]
IV. Unconscionability, Not Performance, Is the Relevant Legal Analogy
What the child-rights critique gestures toward—often without naming it—is the doctrine of unconscionability. In law, unconscionability has two components:
- Procedural unconscionability, involving lack of meaningful choice, power asymmetry, pressure, or surprise;
- Substantive unconscionability, involving overly harsh or one-sided terms.
Applied to youth sport, the concern is primarily procedural. Children often face:
- severe power asymmetries,
- opaque expectations,
- limited exit options,
- heavy parental and institutional pressure, and
- highly concentrated organizational control.
These conditions do not arise because sport is performance-based. They arise because youth sport markets are stratified, expensive, geographically constrained, and institutionally insulated from oversight.[8]
V. Developmental Science Undermines the Self-Regulation Assumption
The assumption that children can meaningfully self-regulate within these systems further exposes the gap between academic rhetoric and legal reality.
Developmental psychology has long shown that self-regulation is not an intrinsic trait but an environmentally scaffolded capacity. Bandura’s work on social learning demonstrates that children acquire norms through modeling.[9] Mischel’s delay-of-gratification research—especially in its later reinterpretations—shows that regulation depends on environmental reliability.[10] The Perry Preschool Project similarly underscores the necessity of stable, structured adult guidance for healthy development.[11] Together, this literature undermines any suggestion that children can autonomously manage risk, pressure, or coercion in high-stakes sport environments. Expecting them to do so is not empowerment; it is abdication.
VI. Governance, Not Morality, Is the Core Failure
The article correctly documents extensive evidence of abuse and exploitation in youth sport, including sexual abuse, coercive training, deprivation, and intimidation. These harms are real and well documented. But their persistence reflects a governance failure rather than an inherent flaw in performance itself.
Children lack independent mechanisms for complaint, review, or redress. Reporting systems typically route through parents, who may themselves be economically or socially invested. Oversight is fragmented, voluntary, or symbolic. In legal terms, there is a regulatory vacuum. This is where the conversation should turn—but often does not.
VII. The Limits of “Awareness” as Reform
Scholars within the sports sphere ultimately call for consciousness-raising, pedagogical change, and scholarly engagement. These goals are not wrong, but they risk what Sartre called the illusion of action: the belief that articulation and critique alone constitute reform.[12]
Unlike consumer products, youth sport offers no warning labels. Parents are rarely informed of developmental tradeoffs, structural risks, or governance failures. Abstract academic discourse does little to alter incentive structures, liability regimes, or institutional accountability.
VIII. Toward a Legally Coherent Framework
A more productive approach would move beyond moral critique toward enforceable standards:
- Transparency obligations requiring disclosure of risks, pathways, and expectations;
- Independent oversight and reporting mechanisms accessible to children;
- Developmentally grounded standards of care, aligned with psychology and education law;
- Recognition of structural inequality in access and opportunity;
- Clear limits on coercive practices, regardless of performance goals.
Recent work by Güllich, Barth, Hambrick, and Macnamara reinforces that elite development is nonlinear and dependent on opportunity structures rather than early specialization.[13] This further weakens narratives that justify pressure or exclusion as “necessary.”
IX. Conclusion
The growing literature on children’s rights in sport raises important moral concerns, but too often substitutes ethical aspiration for legal analysis. Performance orientation is not the core legal problem. The real issue lies in how institutions allocate power, constrain choice, and evade accountability in systems involving legally dependent participants. Until scholars engage directly with doctrines of consent, unconscionability, and governance, calls to “reject performance” will remain rhetorically compelling but legally indeterminate. Protecting children in sport requires not only better values, but enforceable structures that recognize the legal realities of childhood itself.
[1] Christopher R. Matthews, et al., Children’s Rights, Human Development and Play – Rejecting Performance‑Orientated Youth Sport, 1 Sport, Educ. & Soc. (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2024.2385556.
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Regina v. Dudley & Stephens, 14 Q.B.D. 273 (Eng. 1884).
[6] Rolfing v. Tomorrow Realty Auction Co., Inc., 528 So. 2d 463 (Fla. 5th DCA 1988); see also LaBonte Precision, Inc. v. LPI Indus. Corp., 507 So. 2d 1202 (Fla. 4th DCA 1987).
[7] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, in Essays: First Series 33 (1841).
[8] Arne Güllich, et. al., Recent Discoveries on the Acquisition of the Highest Levels of Human Performance, 390 Science eadt7790 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt7790.
[9] Albert Bandura, et. al., Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models, 1 J. Abnormal & Soc. Psychol. 578 (1961).
[10] Walter Mischel, et. al., Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification, 16 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 329 (1970).
[11] David P. Weikart, The Perry Preschool Project: Cognitive and Social Development, in Long-Term Outcomes of Early Childhood Programs, 123 (Lawrence J. Schweinhart et al. eds., 1993).
[12] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Hazel E. Barnes trans., Wash. Square Press 1992) (1943).
[13] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince 63 (Katherine Woods., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1943) (2020) (“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”); see also Henry D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods 83–85 (1854).
