💪✨ Why does the body matter in Christian parenting? In this episode of Upside-Down Parenting, Matt Jones and Janel Greig chat with Dr. Bryan Crutcher about raising healthy, active kids while modeling faith, movement, and God’s design. Practical tips for parents, plus insights on avoiding common pitfalls!
🎧 Listen now and start raising whole, thriving kids for God’s Kingdom!
Episode 36: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Upside Down Parenting Podcast, hosts Matt and Janel speak with Dr. Bryan Crutcher, a professor in kinesiology and sports management at Texas A&M, about why caring for the body matters in Christian parenting. The discussion covers the dangers of early sports specialization in youth athletics, emphasizing instead the importance of diversified physical activities and unstructured play to develop multiple skills and prevent overuse injuries. Dr. Crutcher advocates for age-appropriate physical development and stresses that parents should model active lifestyles to encourage their children to value movement and physical activity as something enjoyable rather than obligatory. The episode concludes as part one of a two-part series, with the next episode promising practical guidance for implementing these principles in daily family life.
Episode Transcript
Dr. Matt Jones (00:00):
Welcome to the Upside Down Parenting Podcast, where we explore what it looks like to raise kids to thrive in God’s upside down kingdom. Today, we’re talking about something that’s often overlooked in Christian parenting: the body. Why does the body matter? And why isn’t following Jesus just about the spiritual side of life?
Our guest today is Dr. Bryan Crutcher, a professor in kinesiology and sports management at Texas A&M, and he’s even sporting the shirt today. Way to go, Bryan. Bryan has degrees in kinesiology, human sport performance, and sports psychology, and a doctoral degree in kinesiology. He is committed. And folks, when I say committed, he is committed to helping people embody ethical, evidence-based practices that honor God with how we care for our bodies.
So by the end of this episode, we’ll have a new perspective on why caring for the body matters and practical takeaways for raising kids who value movement, health, and God’s designs for their lives. Let’s jump in. Bryan, it is great to see you. Thank you for joining Janel and I today on our podcast.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (01:11):
Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it and excited to dive in.
Dr. Matt Jones (01:15):
Yeah. Well, I just want to just point out where our relationship started. It started whenever, I mean, you worked at Colorado Christian for a few years, but you offered a faculty training that said, “Here’s why the body’s important.” And it was fascinating. It was excellent. But the thing that really stood out to me is you offered to create an exercise program for those who were there to help us get more active.
And sorry, this makes me tear up a little bit. I offered to trade mine in for my wife’s who was going through some pretty significant health things, and you said, “I’ll still do it for both of you.” And we have been exercising ever since. And Bryan, it has radically changed my wife’s health and we are so grateful for that. So thank you for not only helping my wife and I, but helping us out today on the Upside Down Parenting Podcast.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (02:10):
Oh, that’s great. I mean, that’s why we do it. In the field of kinesiology, I try to tell my students, at the end of the day, regardless of the population you’re working with, our ultimate goal is to help people and that we have the knowledge to do that through physical health and wellness, but also through psychological and spiritual and emotional. It’s all tied together.
We are one body made of multiple systems, but every system interconnects. And so we have to focus on training every aspect of who we are to reach the best health that we can get to in many different ways. And so I’m so glad to hear that you both were able to benefit from that. And that helps me to feel good about why I do this.
Janel Greig (02:57):
I love that too, Matt. I love hearing that. That’s awesome.
Dr. Matt Jones (03:00):
Yeah. We’ve been doing it for four years now, Cat and I have been. Four years, three or four years now. In fact, my wife texted him and said, “Hey, we’re still doing it.”
Janel Greig (03:09):
That is so neat.
Dr. Matt Jones (03:11):
I love it. Yeah, it’s been great. It’s been great.
Janel Greig (03:11):
I love it. Well, Bryan, let’s dig into that a little bit. From a Christian’s perspective, why does the body matter? Why isn’t faith just spiritual?
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (03:22):
So that’s a great question. And really, let’s look at it from this aspect of faith and Christianity. When we really get down to it, it all comes down to Jesus, how we live our life, how we model behavior, how we model ethics, how we model faith comes down to Jesus Christ. Well, in order for our salvation to be secured, Jesus had to sacrifice himself, but it was a spiritual sacrifice and it was a physical sacrifice.
He had to be 100% God and 100% man, because if he’s only 100% God, you can’t kill him and therefore there’s no sacrifice. But if he’s 100% man, he can’t come back on his own and therefore the payment isn’t sealed. So he had to be both. But when you think about it deeper, it wasn’t just a, okay, he’ll do his ministry and then they’re going to take him through a trial and execute him.
(04:24):
Look at what he had to go through, look at the absolute brutality of what he went through. And I think that there’s a message in that, that in order to secure our salvation, the weight of sin of the entire world, past, present and future had to be laid on him. So it had to be something that was going to cost him everything.
And when we look at that, it points me directly to the human body because it ties in that his physical body had to be broken down to the point beyond anything like we’ve seen, to where he had to feel pain and exhaustion and all the things in order to secure our salvation. So that tells me that there is a massive importance that God has placed on the human body because the human body is the very vessel at which Jesus walked on this earth and the very vessel at which he used to secure our salvation.
(05:19):
So how can we not see the human body as this amazing tool that was utilized for our salvation, but also go back to Genesis. We were created in the image of God. We are image bearers, Imago Dei, image bearers of God. So again, puts this huge importance on the human body, which is why we can’t just look at our faith from a spiritual perspective. We have to look at it from a physical perspective because the two are so tied together.
We look at 1 Corinthians 6:19 and 20. It’s one of my favorite verses, and I have it pulled up. It says, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God?” So right here, we’re claiming that the human body is a vessel for the Holy Spirit that we have been given by God and you are not your own.
(06:13):
We do not belong to ourselves. We were bought with a price. That price being Jesus’s sacrifice with his body and his spirit, so glorify God in your body. That’s a very, very specific verse where God is literally telling us the human body is more than just eat, sleep, work. There’s more to it than that. That ties into our spiritual walk and our faith walk. So that’s kind of where I come from it all starting with Jesus.
Janel Greig (06:46):
Yeah. Thank you. I think that’s going to frame well our entire conversation today too. So thank you. That’s fantastic. Yep.
Dr. Matt Jones (06:54):
So do you think there are ways, because you work with a lot of college students, you’ve been working with college students for a long time, in particular athletes. Are there ways that parents focus too much on performance instead of lifelong habits or enjoyment or even performance at the expense of the physical body?
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (07:15):
Sure. So sport is a very unique landscape when we look at being able to develop physical skills, psychological skills, social skills, whether you’re in a sport that is considered to be a team-based sport like baseball, softball, volleyball, hockey, or a sport that may be considered a little bit more individualized like tennis, but you can still compete with others and still be on a tennis team where maybe there’s different matches going on, but you’re still on the same team, track and field, very similar.
Overall, we’re learning physical skills, psychological skills, social skills. But one thing that we’re seeing is that in the United States, particularly this early professionalization, this early specialization of youth sport, where we are seeing young athletes, eight, nine, 10 years old doing travel playing. They’re playing for the team at their school, they’re on a travel squad, they have private coaches, they’re doing private training at these specialized gyms and they’re focusing on this one sport that they have specialized in.
(08:24):
And we know from the research that children who play a multitude of different sports will develop multiple different types of neurological, physiological, sociological, psychological skills that will benefit them so that when they do want to specialize later on as they get into late high school and college, where that’s where we really want to start to specialize, particularly getting into college, but even in high school, they should be playing multiple sports. That’s where we start to see the benefit of all these different skills that they’ve learned.
(08:55):
The hard part is there are some sports that do lend themselves to early specializations, figure skating, gymnastics, because the shelf life of those sports may not be as long as some of the other sports. So I do understand that there might be parents saying, “Well, my child is doing this sport and it is a very early onset sport.” So they kind of have to specialize. I get that.
But at the same time, I would strongly encourage parents to have their child be engaging either in other sports or if not necessarily in other sports and other activities, other physical activities that allow them to do movements that maybe aren’t specific to their sport, but are specific to just being able to learn how to control movement, learn how to engage with your environment. I think one of the best things that I remember as a child in PE was tag, the game of tag about as simple as you can get. But think about it. What does tag need?
Dr. Matt Jones (09:55):
I like dodgeball better.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (09:57):
Well, we play dodgeball too.
Dr. Matt Jones (09:59):
Okay. All right.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (09:59):
We played dodgeball too, but think about tag. And we said, okay, here are the rules. Playground, everything you can jump, you just have to get away from people. So right away, what are kids doing? They’re engaging in thought processes. They’re engaging in problem solving because they’re forming rules because sport is very, very rule-based. Tag is a little more free play. You can kind of make it up as you go. I think that’s important.
Then what do you need in tag? You need conditioning. You need to be able to run for a long time. You need to be fast. You need to be able to change direction. You got to climb on whatever playground equipment is there to try to get away from whoever’s trying to tag you. I mean, it requires so many different physical skills and kids are just playing and they’re having fun. It’s not super structured.
(10:46):
So I think that allows children to explore different movements to be able to figure out what they’re good at, what they’re not, what they need to work on. But also when you only do one sport and you are in that sport, you get really good at those movements. But we know based on the research that when your body is really good at doing a multitude of different movements, it allows you to then be better at the movements that may be necessary for your sport because your nervous system learns how to adapt.
Your mind learns how to adapt to different movements and in different scenarios that may or may not come up in your sport, but it goes beyond that. It’s adaptability. It’s the body learning how to adapt to what it needs in that moment. And that’s why it’s so important for children to play games, sports, all different kinds of stuff.
(11:35):
Even if they are in an early specialization sport, do not spend all of the time in that particular sport. Allow them to do some other things. But again, this gets hard too if your child is potentially Olympic caliber, which we do see. But even then, I would still suggest, they’ve got to do some other things. They’ve got to do some other things. We’ve got to figure out a way to do some other training, some other things that will still contribute to their development, but we don’t want to see this overuse, this overtraining, this physical, psychological burnout that we are seeing at higher rates than we used to, especially among children.
Because you look at also the research, what is one of the top things why children want to play sports? They want to have fun. They want to have fun. And the whole, everyone gets a trophy. I know that that’s definitely a debate. I am all for competition. And I definitely think that there is an age where competition becomes important because we need to learn how to win well and lose well and problem solve and overcome things that happen that, oh, well, we all want to win, but that’s not life.
(12:48):
But when you’re talking, four year olds and five year olds, just let them have fun. Just let them have a good time. And you don’t necessarily need to keep score at that age. Just let them build some confidence. And then as they get older and you start getting into that middle school and all that, then yeah, okay, let’s introduce the competitive component. But I’ll always say it depends. It’s a thing that we use a lot in this field. It depends on the sport. It depends on the situation. There’s no perfect answer, but there’s definitely an answer that seems to lend itself to better outcomes. And that is, be very, very diversified in your activity and in your sports from a young age.
Janel Greig (13:29):
I appreciate that so much, Bryan. I think my kids are not going to be D1 athletes and they play everything. They do everything. So it’s not a personal problem. And I work with so many people that struggle with that, with a kid that’s very gifted in baseball, for example. And so they play it year round and start investing in that young, and then they’re in high school and they have to have surgery already on their shoulder from pitching. So I think that scope that you just provided is such good groundwork for folks to hear.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (13:58):
Yeah. The injury aspect, just to throw this in here really quick. The injury aspect too is we’re seeing that when you do the same repetitive motions over and over and over again, we are seeing much higher rates of overuse injuries now in youth athletes. I’ve seen athletes under the age of 13 in a sport like baseball already getting surgeries that we typically didn’t even see until they were in the major leagues. And now we’re seeing it at the youth and high school level. And also I think just, again, this professionalization is becoming a, it’s pushing parents to feel like they have to jump on this stuff early.
(14:40):
And again, it may not necessarily be the best outcome because we hear of stories like, oh, Tiger Woods who played since he’s the exception, not the rule. And so we have to look at these factors of what are the exceptions and not the rules. And again, I’ll bring it back to there’s always going to be different circumstances, but the overarching idea is let your child diversify their physical activities and their sports. And even if there’s that one sport that they’re really good at and they really could go far, absolutely they can spend more time in that sport.
But while they’re still young, while they’re your little tykes, you want them to be just playing everything, getting different experiences and having fun and making sure that they don’t lose the joy of physical activity, but also just no overuse injuries, learning how to problem solve in different activities that then they can bring back to the sport that they want to do as their main sport, because again, we are trying to create adaptability over time. So that’s, I think, really where we need to hit.
Janel Greig (15:48):
Yep, yep. Thank you for that. Kind of leading in from that, what would you say healthy physical formation looks like across the different stages of life? So kids, teens, two adults, and then how do those movements and needs and abilities change as the kiddos grow? And for parents, what would be a good thing or good things to focus on at each stage of development?
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (16:10):
So typically, if we’re just categorizing different levels of development, so we’re looking at children, youth. So from the time that they can walk to teenage years, just play sports, have fun, be active. You can play organized sports, but also you’ve got to play like unstructured games, unstructured play, make the rules up as you go. When I was a kid, I remember one of the things that we did, we had a big playground. We have recess. We would stand on the opposite sides of the playground and we would just kick balls back and forth to each other for an hour.
And there was this huge lamp, or sorry, like a street lamp thing. It was probably 30 feet in the air and we’re eight, nine years old. So the goal was if you could kick it over the lamp, you get a certain amount of points. If you kick it under the lamp, you get a certain amount of points. If you hit the lamp, you get the most points. And maybe that wasn’t something we should be trying to do is break the lamp, but we’re nine years old. We were making rules up as we went, and it was so much fun to just literally just kick for an hour. We were literally not doing anything else.
Dr. Matt Jones (17:16):
Just as long as they don’t play a tag with the flag, the light poles, so they run into it.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (17:22):
No, no, no.
Dr. Matt Jones (17:23):
Okay, good.
Dr. Bryan Crutcher (17:24):
We were jumping on and off the different slides and things, flying off the swings and things like that. So obviously always be safe, but we were making rules up as we went. And I’m sitting here now 30 years later, and I can immediately recall that memory. Why? Because it was fun. It was exciting. I wasn’t trying to get an NIL contract at six years old. I was just wanting to have some fun and play around.
And so for children, I think that that’s important. And then as they start to get closer to their teen years, yes, we can start to introduce more structured games, more structured sports, learning the importance of rules, learning the importance of why we need to follow rules. Absolutely. Then you get into the teenage years. Now you can start thinking about, what sports do you gravitate towards? Which ones are your skillset more adaptable to?
(18:17):
And you start getting into thinking about, “Oh, I really want to play this in high school and maybe even in college or beyond.” And then you get to the college space. We do see that the older we get, the more our physical activity goes down because we start to get into life, we get responsibilities, we don’t have recess anymore. So you have to learn how to create recess.
As you get into your 20s, your 30s, your 40s and beyond, you could be 95 years old and still put muscle mass on. It’s not going to be the same as when you’re 20, but there is no age limit to exercise. If anybody says, “I’m too old,” I will say, “I’m going to push back on that. You are not.” Yes, there may be considerations we have to take with your age, but we can still have you move.
(19:04):
We just have to figure out what works for you. So I think parents need to not only think about that for their kids, but I’m going to flip it a little bit. Parents need to think about it for themselves because when parents model physical activity, I think it sets a good precedent for the children to be physically active. And there’s research that will support this. There’s also research, just like anything, there’s going to be research that supports it. There’s going to be research that maybe says it doesn’t have as much of an effect.
But from the research that I have read, I think that there is really good quality research out there, really well done research studies published that show that when parents are more active, when they highlight physical activity as a part of the family dynamic, going on walks together, playing at the park together, it sets a precedent for the children to learn that physical activity is not only important, but it’s fun and it’s something that they want to do.
(20:00):
Not that they have to do it, but they want to do it. And that’s what I want parents to understand, is I want you to have your children want to be active, want to get outside and not just sit in front of a screen for nine hours a day, right? Get away from the tech and go outside, breathe in some fresh air. Honestly, for lack of a better way of saying it, play in some dirt and just get outside and have some fun. And I think that that is huge. I think if parents model that, I think that there is a strong relationship that it will be more likely, not always obviously, but it will be more likely that the children will adopt this behavior and want to be active.
Janel Greig (20:40):
Yeah.
Dr. Matt Jones (20:40):
Those are great. And you essentially pointed out two topics we really wanted to get in there near the end. First of all, how has technology and screen time changed the way the body’s developed and moved? And I definitely want to have time to do this because we really do. We see that a lot. We call one of my nephews the iPad kid because his first word, literally, his first word was iPad. He would go up to his grandpa, iPad, and so that was his first word. And so let’s talk about that one and then maybe we can take a quick segue into our quick questions and then I want to come back to parents. But how has technology and screen time changed the way bodies develop and move?
(21:21):
Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Upside Down Parenting Podcast. You’ve been listening to the first part of our discussion with Dr. Bryan Krutcher about why the body matters in Christian parenting and what it means to raise kids who follow Jesus with their whole selves.
In our next episode, we’re going to continue the conversation and dive into something really practical, how parents can actually live this out day today, especially when it comes to helping our kids develop healthy rhythms, value movement, and honor God with their bodies. You won’t want to miss it. So be sure to subscribe and we’ll see you next time as we keep learning what it means to parent in an upside down way for King Jesus.