Positive Youth Development Through Sports-Part 3(Final)

Time is the last and often neglected component of the PPCT model. According to Garcia Bengoechea and Johnson (2001), human development can only be fully understood if it is examined over an extended period of time. 

Thus, in order to truly comprehend child development in sport, individual attributes and their environmental interactions must be studied over time. 

The DMSP outlines how different activities benefit children’s development at different ages, and provides a temporal progression of sport involvement with stages that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from each other. 

The first two trajectories (i.e. recreational participation through sampling and elite performance through sampling) include activities and environments that are similar during childhood and progressively different during early adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood. 

For example,both trajectories include the sampling years, which focus on letting children experiment with various ways of executing sport skills in various contexts through deliberate play and involvement for fun in several sports. 

The DMSP suggest that children should spend more time in deliberate play activities than in deliberate practice activities during the sampling years (age 6–12). 

However, as children age and mature, the recommended amount of deliberate play activities can be slowly replaced by deliberate practice activities, depending on the eventual goals of the individual (e.g. recreation or elite sport participation). 

Thus, in youth sport programs, the time component of the PPCT model should focus on how playing and training activities change throughout development, as outlined by the DMSP.

Conclusion
This chapter has examined research in youth sport through an integrated developmental and ecological lens. 

The PPCT components of Bronfebrenner’s ecological system theory and principles of positive youth development combined with the DMSP served as a framework to increase understanding of healthy youth development through sport participation. 

Based on youth sport research,particularly Cote and colleagues’ DMSP, the following suggestions are made for youth sport programs aiming to promote positive youth development

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