Category: Advisory Council

July 22, 2024

What We Can All Learn About Parenting From the Parents of Olympic Athletes

Travis Dorsch

January 2, 2023

Center for Families announces new leadership

Valerie Knopik, head of the Department of Human Development and Family Science, has announced the appointment of Melissa Franks as the Director of the Center for Families, effective Jan. 1, 2023. Robert Duncan will continue as Associate Director for Policy....

October 18, 2022

Price of school sports makes access difficult for low-income families

Kids can learn great life lessons by playing sports, but the price tag to participate is a major stress point for families. Youth sports is big business with 56% of kids under the age of 17 playing on a team....

September 26, 2022

Purdue Center for Families shapes policy, discovery to improve family outcomes

“The idea of family and the work that families do becomes more and more important,” said Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, professor of human development and family studies and director of the Center for Families. “If families are not able to do...

January 3, 2022

Why kids are losing interest in playing team sports

Travis Dorsch, Utah State University Families in Sport Lab, joins The News with Shepard Smith to discuss why young people are less interested in playing team sports. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbGgaxhYgAg

December 6, 2021

Kids are losing interest in organized sports. Why that matters

For more than a century, team sports have been a mainstay of American childhood. What began as a way to keep boys in cities occupied and out of trouble has evolved into a $19-billion industry, with much of that revenue...

August 18, 2021

All play, no fun: Pushing back on the pressures of youth sports

The world of youth sports has become a pressure cooker – one that, for now, the Redds have managed to resist. “All we ask when she comes home,” says Ms. Redd, “is how was practice and did you have fun?”

August 5, 2021

The effects of the pandemic on young people and youth sports

In collaboration with The Aspen Institute‘s Sports & Society Program, Families in Sport Lab at Utah State University, and Louisiana Tech University‘s Minds in Motion Lab, TeamSnap released the results of its research study

April 29, 2019

The booming business of youth sports leaves some opportunities out of reach for kids of working families

From travel commitments to coaches’ salaries and equipment, the chance for kids to play can often come at an exorbitant cost; insight from Dr. Travis Dorsch, assistant professor at Utah State University and founding director of the Families in Sport

April 29, 2019

The human cost of raising youth sports to a ‘$17 billion’ industry

A 2016 Families in Sport Lab study found that parents reported spending between 2 to 10 percent of their family’s gross annual household income on athletic activities, per child. “You think about families maybe that have two or three or