…why not football mom, baseball mom, or basketball mom?
Soccer mom, as far as I can tell, is an American term made popular during the 1996 presidential elections, used to describe a key demographic – mothers who, by spending lots of time shuttling their children to and from soccer practice, demonstrate that they were concerned about their children. Other attributes often associated with this demographic are suburban, married, busy, drives a minivan/SUV and so on.
What puzzles me is the choice of sport in the term: why soccer? Globally, soccer is an extremely popular sport, but there are many sports more popular than it in USA, and I imagine this would extend to after-school activities. I see that in Canada there's the equivalent term hockey mom which makes more sense.
Was the term coined in a place and time where soccer was a more natural choice? Is soccer a more prominent sport in the after-school world? Or was there some other historical accident?
Best Answer
As an American mom whose kids I shuttled to and from soccer (along with their dad, who played basketball in HS/college), I would like to give an opinion.
Baseball/football/basketball are the big three here. When my kids were very, very young, the sport for little kids was tee-ball, a version of baseball/softball where the ball is not pitched but sits on a tee as does a golf ball (taller, of course). After tee-ball, a child would graduate to "Little League", which was "the" game for kids (esp. boys, but girls, too) to play (and as adults to softball). At about that time, soccer was hitting the US in a big way. A lot of the emphasis on young children's sports shifted away from tee-ball and little league to soccer, probably because tee-ball is still more demanding for a child's coordination than soccer, and out of a desire to join the rest of the western world in their preoccupation with the sport.
Unfortunately, in the beginning, this children's sport was mainly one of the upper and middle classes, a very important demographic for politicians, as women vote more often than men, and the upper and middle classes more often than the lower. So, an appeal to "soccer moms" was supposed to help win elections.
Unfortunately, in trying to decrease the popularity of certain politicians in the eyes of these women, opposing party candidates painted an uglier picture of "soccer moms".
Although I did shuttle my kids to soccer, I was not a soccer mom any more than my husband was a soccer dad. They played other sports in season, and I never felt harried, though we did indeed have the minivan.