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Depression and anxiety are prevalent and persistent mental health concerns for adolescents in the US with girls reporting higher levels than boys. Depression and anxiety pose substantial implications including suicide risk, low academic achievement, and substance abuse. Sports team participation has been shown to mitigate these risks. The current study builds upon this prior work by exploring whether the protective effects of participation in sports teams in adolescence on mental health outcomes extends into early adulthood, in a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, population-based sample of US young adults. We also examine whether these associations vary by gender and other sociodemographic factors.
Methods
Analyses are based on data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a population-based longitudinal study of approximately 5000 children born between 1998 and 2000, and followed-up at child ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 22. The FFCWS oversampled births to unmarried mothers (3 to 1 ratio) and is representative of such births in all large US cities at that time. Analyses are based on a sample of approximately 3400 youth interviewed in year-15, and 2650 young adults interviewed at year-22.
Our primary independent variable is adolescents’ self-reports of how often they spend time on athletic or sports teams at year-15, with responses of never, sometimes (<once/month, at least once/month; once/week), or often (several times/week). Outcome variables include adolescent self-reported depression and anxiety at year-15, parent-reported internalizing behavior problems at year-15, and young adult self-reported depression and anxiety at year-22. We include a rich set of controls; importantly including measures of school belonging and other extracurricular activities, and a measure of internalizing behavior problems at prior waves. We estimate full information maximum likelihood regression models of mental health outcomes on frequency of participation in sports teams and covariates.
Results
Multivariate results indicate that adolescents who often participate in sports show substantially lower depression (20% SD; p<0.001) and parent-reported internalizing behavior problems (23% SD lower; p<0.001) at age 15, and lower depression in young adulthood (13% SD; p<0.001) compared to adolescents who never participated in sports. Adolescents who sometimes participated in sports teams, compared to never, had lower parent-reported internalizing behavior problems at year-15 (18% SD; p<0.001) and lower self-reported depression at year-22 (11% SD; p<0.05). Interestingly, we find that the association of sports team participation with depression was much weaker among young adult females compared to males, based on self-reported gender, at year-22, but no differences by sex, based on sex assigned at birth, at year-15.
Conclusions and Implications
We find strong negative associations of adolescents’ participation in sports teams with mental health outcomes in adolescence and continuing into young adulthood. These results, consistent with and building on prior work, point to the importance of sports team participation in adolescence protecting against mental health problems concurrently and in later life, potentially shielding from serious consequences throughout the life course. The findings support integrating sports into mental health interventions for adolescents, potentially mitigating long-term mental health risks in the US.