‘It’s alpha omega for succeeding and thriving’: parents, children and sporting cultivation in Norway

ABSTRACT

It has become increasingly apparent, internationally, that childhood is a crucial life-stage in the formation of predispositions towards sports participation and that parents are increasingly investing in the sporting capital of their children via a process of ‘concerted cultivation’. It is surprising, therefore, that parents’ involvement in the development of their children's sporting interests has received so little attention in Norway, given that sport is a significant pastime for Norwegians and participation has been steadily increasing – among youngsters, in particular – over the past several decades. Through a qualitative case study of a combined primary and secondary school in a small Norwegian city, this study sought to add to recent explorations of the role of parents in children's sporting involvement in Norway. As expected, it was evident that sport becomes taken for granted and internalised very early on in Norwegian children's lives. Less expected was the recognition that children's nascent sporting interests were often generated by sports clubs via early years schooling and, therefore, that parents played only one (albeit very important) part in the formation of their youngsters’ early sporting habits. Thus, parents, sports clubs and early years schooling appeared to form something akin to a ‘sporting trinity’ in youngsters’ nascent sporting careers. These findings may have implications for policy-makers looking towards Norway for a ‘recipe’ for sports participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Parents
• concerted cultivation
• socialisation
• sport

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback on the original draft of this paper. Their comments were immensely helpful, as well as constructive and supportive. We would also like to thank Professor Miranda Thurston of Inland Norway University for her invaluable comments on the various iterations of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Patrick Foss Johansen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4338-2921

Notes

1. Studies in Sweden notwithstanding (see, for example, Eliasson, 2009; Karp, 2000).

2. ‘Sport’ is taken to include not only organised, competitive, and physically vigorous activities but also unorganised, so-called lifestyle sports and physical recreation more generally (Green, 2010).

3. Nine of the 10 families in the study constituted the ‘traditional’ two-parent families. The remaining family was headed by a single-mother sharing custody of her two children.

4. It is worth noting that the focus of the study was not on the unintended and undesirable consequences that can follow from intense parental involvement in children's sports participation (see, for instance, Augustsson, 2007), even though several parents hinted at such issues.