Yuen: What’s wrong with youth sports? Let’s start with overinvolved parents.

If you’ve ever spent 12 hours in a gym watching 8-year-olds play primitive basketball on a glorious June weekend in Minnesota, you may have wondered why you submitted yourself and your family to the all-consuming vortex of youth sports.

And Johnny Tauer is right there with you.

Tauer can see the good, the bad and the ugly of today’s hyper-organized culture of youth sports. He might be the only tenured psychology professor in the country who also is head coach of a Division I basketball team. And he’s struggled to find his own balance as sports dad/chauffeur/scheduler. (All three of his sons play basketball, and who knows what’s in store for his 3-year-old daughter.)

Adults have largely taken over the realm of child’s play. The grown-ups have added more rigor and structure to youth sports but stripped away much of the autonomy from children, said Tauer, who coaches at the University of St. Thomas. Competitive club teams demand a lot of time, money and energy, compounding stress in the lives of both kids and the parents.

Ten years ago, Tauer, of St. Paul, authored a book about the culture of youth sports called “Why Less Is More for WOSPs — Well-intentioned, Overinvolved Sports Parents.”

That’s me. I’m not the soccer mom picking fights with the ref, but I am at times stressed out at my middle-schooler’s games, scrutinizing his moves, and muttering “Shoot!” from my lawn chair. Now that my second-grader is old enough to try out for pay-to-play club sports, I’m not sure that path is the best option for him or for me.

So I asked Tauer, 52, to put my dilemma in perspective.

“Parents are responding to cultural forces,” he said. “Most parents don’t love this, but they think, ‘If I want my son or daughter to do well and have every opportunity, and I see every other 6-year-old signing up for all these leagues, I’d better do the same thing.’ Before you know it, you’re in this vicious cycle of how do I get out of it?”

Another disconnect Tauer sees is between what parents say they want for their kids and what they will fight for. If you ask moms and dads about their goals for their children in athletics, they’ll mention things like teamwork, performing under pressure and developing self-confidence and moral character.

Then ask a coach what parents complain about.

“Probably 90% of coaches will say two words: playing time,” Tauer said. “Something’s not clicking here. We’re missing the mark.”

Why do youth sports often present such conflict with our values? And how can we as parents make the best decisions for our families? Tauer shared thoughts he’s gleaned as an athlete, coach and social psychologist who specializes in intrinsic motivation.

Try telling your kid to run down to the park and play. Problem is, there’s a good chance no one will be there. “The challenge is that kids are so overscheduled that nobody goes to parks on their own,” Tauer said. “It’s a ghost town.”

Tauer runs a popular youth summer basketball camp. More than a decade ago, he ran an experiment of sorts. He asked 40 campers if they’d rather play five rounds of games, including one game in which there would be no referee. The other option was to play only four rounds of games, but each game would be officiated.

He was horrified when 80% of the kids chose not to play if the game wasn’t supervised. If there were no adult calling the shots, the kids reasoned, they wouldn’t be able to agree on foul calls, keep track of time, or even determine who won.

“And it’s no fault of theirs — they’ve never done it,” he said.

While there are many benefits associated with organized sports, “the longer you can wait, the better,” Tauer said.

Think about a 9-year-old who makes it onto an elite travel team. You may be waking her up at 6 a.m., shuttling her across town to play in a tournament, and squeezing in a trip to McDonald’s between games. The cycle repeats the following day.

“What if, instead, they went to a batting cage for those days for 60 straight minutes and took hundreds and hundreds of swings?” Tauer said. “Which one of those kids got better?”

Kids, especially those 10 and under, can experience the joys of competition and improve their athletic skills by never leaving their neighborhoods, Tauer said. It just might require parents to get the ball rolling and coordinate some games.

Tauer recommends that every family create five goals at the start of the season. They might be as simple as “Make new friends” or “Have fun” or “Become more resilient.” If they complete those goals, mark it down as a success and be thrilled, he said. Don’t obsess over playing time, which is what parents usually gravitate to because it’s easier to measure.

And when making commitments to sports, make sure to consider how it might affect your own worthy goal of slowing down as a family. Embrace moderation.

If a kid isn’t interested in playing sports, just remember not everyone will be an athlete, and that’s OK.

“We have to ask, are we giving them an array of options that allow them to figure out what they want to do?” Tauer said. “If a kid at a certain age says, ‘I don’t want to play sports, I want to play piano,' I hope we pour as much into them playing the piano as we would sports.”

I admit I have bribed, er, incentivized, my child to enroll in an accelerated math class. Do rewards work?

The short answer is they can in the short term, especially if the child has been resisting the behavior, Tauer said. But be careful about rewarding them for an activity that your kids already love. Then their reasons for doing the behavior become muddled.

When he’s recruiting athletes to play for St. Thomas, Tauer obviously looks for talent. But intrinsic motivation — do they love to play? — is also a must. Competitive joy, unselfishness and grit all matter, too.

For a child who is obsessed with sports, parents should know that overscheduling and harboring unrealistic expectations can kill some of that inner spark, Tauer said.

“I can’t promise a parent that ‘this’ will get your kid to Division I,” he said of his philosophy, “but I can promise them that you can screw it up. It’s actually easier to screw up motivation than to create it.”