Tykes and ‘Timbits’: A Critical Examination of Organized Sport Programs for Preschoolers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a trend of children participating in sport at earlier ages, coupled with increased program availability and enrolments for children under the age of six. Despite growing concern regarding preschooler physical activity levels, specific attention to sport has been limited. In this chapter, we draw upon original research among 8 childcare providers, 19 parents, and 57 preschoolers (aged 2–5 years) in central Canada, to explore the perceived objectives and outcomes of preschooler sport. Interview and focus group data was analyzed through inductive and deductive techniques, guided by key concepts of the Developmental Model of Sport Participation and Long Term Athlete Development Model. Findings reflect perceived objectives and outcomes of preschooler sport paralleling those of youth sport, with participants speaking most prominently about sport as a platform for psychosocial and life skill development (i.e., interpersonal skills, confidence, competence, being a team player, learning to win and lose), in addition to being a pathway to physical health and motor skill development; however, there was often little consensus on whether developmental outcomes were actually attained, and what the mechanisms and processes were within preschooler sport, which facilitated such development. As such, we question the relevance of organized sport for preschoolers, while also highlighting a need for further research to best optimize preschoolers’ development through sport—a field that remains in its infancy. Given current participation trends are unlikely to reverse, we conclude by integrating participants’ insights, to make preliminary recommendations for improved preschooler sport programming.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".