Parents of Athletes Beware: Burnout is Now an Official Medical Syndrome
Parents with kids playing youth sports should note the World Health Organization’s recent classification of burnout as an official medical syndrome. WHO states that burnout is a medical syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
WHO specifically characterizes burnout with having three dimensions:
- Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job;
- Reduced professional efficacy.
From the perspective of burnout in youth sports, one of the statements from WHO that caught my eye was that:
“Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
This line from WHO came to me as a surprise. I often hear people use the term burnout outside the context of an occupation. As a matter of fact, in my experience people refer to burnout most often in the context of burnout in youth sports. This leads me to believe one of two things to be true.
- Either kids aren’t really burning out of youth sports and the experts are misdiagnosing the real problem
- Or kids who burnout of youth sports view playing sports as a job and that’s what’s causing the burnout.
Based on my experience I would have to say the answer is more likely #2 than #1. So my takeaway for parents of young athletes is this…
As long as you don’t make youth sports feel like a job, you don’t have to worry about your child burning out.