[ams6110]

This is a big problem in youth sports. Forcing kids to specialize at a very early age. A far better approach is to expose your kids to a variety of sports and let them figure out which ones they like. I do think kids should do sports, the activity is good both physically and mentally, they learn that effort produces results and they learn how to win and lose and move on. And it opens them up to social situations that they will otherwise be completely cut out of.

But unless your kid is one of the rare ones who is really athletically gifted, setting up dreams of scholarships and professional careers is just setting them up for failure. You should not even be thinking about that until about middle school age, and only on advice of people who will give you an unbiased evaluation. Johnny may be the best football player on the team and still be absolutely unremarkable for scholarship or professional consideration. Most parents, unless they were elite themselves, don't know enough to judge and certainly are not objective.

[mcguire]

This would probably be best for the kids, but...

"...not even be thinking about that until about middle school age..."

your kids will never be professional football, baseball, basketball (or soccer, probably) players, or Olympic gymnasts, or classical musicians because they will be competing against people who have been practising since they were three. No matter how much natural gift they have.

[ams6110]

Disagree. Professional athletes cannot be made by practice alone. The natural gift, coordination, balance, athletic ability, competitive drive, and other inborn traits are what matters most. There are professional athletes who didn't even seriously play their pro sport until high school, and uncounted thousands of kids who were pushed into something in preschool and never earned a dime from it.

[lsc]

So, certainly the 'gift' is necessary to compete at a high level... but so is practice. You need both. In fact, my understanding is that one of the major 'gifts' that most elite athletes have is that they recover faster than the rest of us, so they can productively practice things that require muscle growth more than you or I could. That "gift" becomes largely worthless if they don't practice.

In a field you might understand better, I have a reasonably high IQ, which helps a lot when it comes to tests like the GRE and the MAT. I scored in the 95th percentile on the GRE verbal reasoning test, and the 45th percentile on the GRE math test (at age 37, with no college experience) because I have not practiced math. I mean, I'm practicing now,[1] and getting better, but I'm never going to be as good at math as I would have been if I had taken it seriously from a young age. This is especially stark for me, because I work in the computer industry and am surrounded by people who studied math from an early age, for whom it's simple and natural. Nearly everyone I work with did calculus in high school, and found it easy.

For that matter, I think I could bring up my verbal reasoning with practice, as well; I read a lot, and my intuition for what feels right in a sentence is usually right, but I fail grammar tests that require me to name the error.

[1]I'm on Khan academy now, and I'm super amused at the badges I get. I'm doing it in a linear way, rather than skipping ahead, so I'm 60% through "the world of math" challenge. The badges I got this week were all from programs created by what I think are prestigious schools... at the 8th grade level.

[skybrian]

You know what? That's good to know. The lesson is that any competition that requires people to train since they were 3 has too many competitors and should be spurned. This is a market signal to find something else to do.

One of the reasons we have lots of ways of competing is so that there are more (incomparable) ways to be good at something.

Specifically, this article tells us that you don't want your daughter to try to become an Olympic gymnast.

[sincerely]

To the best of my knowledge, research is indicating that early specialization in sports only contributes to a very modest gain in skill later in life at the cost of much higher dropout rates, decreased measured enjoyment, and increased injury rates among participants.

My personal experience as a near-Olympic class athlete (swimming) backs this up - the people that were on club teams at age 9 were not the same people that were later swimming at a level where they could qualify for Olympic Trials.

[nradov]

False. There are many professional athletes playing today who started much later than age 3.

[mcguire]

In gymnastics?

Certainly, they don't let you play football much until you're 6-9 and then not seriously until you're 12-14. Likewise, basketball and baseball. But very few professionals or top amateurs (for those sports where that is the top) started much later than the earliest they could.