“Adults know what's best for children!”: A critical narrative analysis of children's participation rights in sports

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to be heard in all matters that affect their participation in sports and due weight should be given to these views in accordance with a child's evolving capacity. Yet, to date, sports sociologists have paid little attention to participation rights, focusing instead on studying the violation of children's rights with regard to child labour, sexual harassment and abuse and measures for safeguarding young participants. Drawing upon data from a critical narrative study of sport for the very young in Norway (a country that has had children's rights in sport policy for nearly five decades), the article examines how actors (parents, children, coaches, managers) in sports clubs narrate the child's right to be heard. It explores what discourses/narratives of children in sport are constructed and in what ways children are positioned as rights bearers. The critical narrative discourse analysis reveals that children are seldom positioned as learning to be agentic beings, that technologies of dominance in sport work to discipline very young children into docile recipients of adult expertise, and children's right to be heard is peripheral to sports clubs’ agendas of professionalisation.