The Utilitarian Shift

Parental Withdrawal and the Dynamics of Sport Dropout in Early Adolescence

Bibliographic Data

ID13023958
AuthorsOrr Levental (0000-0001-5731-3567, Tel Hai Academic College, corresponding author), Dalit Lev-Arey (0000-0002-6902-9552, Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Year2026
Volume16
Issue3
Pages80-80
Publication date2026-02-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocieties (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2075-4698 • E-ISSN: 2075-4698
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/soc16030080
OpenAlexW7131347197
LanguageEN
References cited51

Early adolescent sport dropout is commonly explained through individual psychological factors such as declining motivation, burnout, or identity conflict. While valuable, these accounts often assume parental logistical and financial support as a stable background condition. This conceptual article introduces the Utilitarian Shift as a novel, family-level structural mechanism that helps explain why sport dropout peaks during early adolescence. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory, sociological perspectives on family investment, and developmental psychology, the framework conceptualizes dropout as emerging from a developmentally timed recalibration of parental investment. During childhood, parental support is largely sustained by custodial and broad developmental incentives; however, as adolescents gain functional independence and perceived developmental returns decline, continued investment becomes conditional rather than assumed. At the same time, sport system demands intensify through specialization pressures, rising costs, and selection mechanisms such as the Relative Age Effect. The convergence of declining perceived returns and escalating costs prompts rational parental withdrawal of logistical and financial support, thereby dismantling the material infrastructure required for sustained participation. Importantly, this withdrawal precedes and reshapes adolescents’ capacity to enact motivation, agency, and resilience, rather than merely responding to disengagement. The article situates early adolescent sport dropout as a relational and structurally mediated process, shifting analytic attention away from athlete-centered deficit models toward dynamic parental decision-making within marketized youth sport systems. Practically, the framework highlights the need for sport organizations and governing bodies to redesign participation pathways and value propositions that sustain parental engagement during early adolescence, even in the absence of elite performance trajectories

Conceptual framework · Dropout (neural networks · Early childhood · Elite · Identity (music · Investment (military · Social exchange theory · Motivation and Self-Concept in Sports · Sport Psychology and Performance · Youth Development and Social Support

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Open DOIOpen Access