Abstract
Parents often have to support their children's sports activities. On club teams, mothers especially play large roles in supporting children's activities, but their roles aren't directly related to playing sports. Instead, they support children from the shadows. Regarding this situation, various problems have been pointed out in previous research.
Nevertheless, why do only mothers continue supporting children from the shadows? The purpose of this study is to clarify the mechanisms that reproduce the roles of mothers, using data from focus group discussions. In this research, two focus group discussions are conducted with 10 schoolchildren's mothers. One of these groups consisted of mothers who provided lots of support to their children's club teams. The other group consisted of mothers whose children didn't play sports on club teams.
Results showed that the burden of “investment” was greater than the “benefit” for mothers. So they needed to collect informal information about their roles from other groups of mothers (“Mama-tomo”). Then they chose to join the club or not. Some mothers gave up on their children's participation in clubs. Others chose which clubs to join based on the extent to which they can bear the burden.
Consequently, mothers built networks among other mothers with the same degree of burden, as roles in each club were entrenched. Information in the clubs was again brought to the “Mama-tomo” network. Study results indicated that the structure where mothers play a marginal role in their children's sports activities is reproduced by a mother's behavior to reduce the burden.
