Ready or Not, Here Come Sports

With spring here, I thought it appropriate to write about young children and sports. First up: why readiness matters.

Participation in organized sports, if developmentally appropriate, can offer children an opportunity for physical activity and social interaction -- both of which are critical to a child's development. But when the requirements and expectations of organized sports go beyond a child's level of readiness and maturation (when it's developmentally inappropriate), the experience will have more negative than positive results.

What determines readiness? Well, it's important to remember that every child develops at his or her own pace. Still, there are certain "givens" where young children are concerned. One is that they're still growing. Their bones haven't completely calcified, their muscles have not reached their peak volume, and their organs are not fully developed. Additionally, their bodies don't possess the mechanisms needed to relieve their bodies of heat; their visual perception is a long way from mature; and their eye-hand and eye-foot coordination won't be entirely developed for another several years!

In a nutshell, children are not just short adults. Among other things, expecting them to play adult games with adult rules and adult-sized equipment puts them in harm's way physically. Doctors advise against high-impact sports like hockey and football for children under the age of 8 because of the immaturity of their organs and skeletal structures. Soccer, which is thought to be safe for children of both genders, actually has a high rate of injury among young children. Even among professional players, almost one-third suffer at least one injury every season.

Where baseball and softball are concerned, the possibilities are even more frightening. These sports were recently determined to be the leading cause of sports-related eye injuries in children, with the highest incidence occurring in children between the ages of 5 and 14. Even scarier, during a seven-year period in the 1990s there were 40 baseball- or softball-related deaths of children in that same age span. The primary causes of death were blows to the head, neck, and chest.

Among the reasons for these horrific statistics are the facts that:

• young pitchers can't yet throw accurately
• young children don't possess the reaction time needed to instantly evade a fast-approaching ball
• the chest walls of young children are thinner than those of teenagers and adults
• figure-ground perception -- the ability to distinguish an object from its surroundings -- doesn't reach maturity until 8 to 12 years old
• depth perception -- the ability to judge distance in relation to oneself -- isn't usually mature until about age 12

According to the American College of Sports Medicine, more than three-quarters of a million children under the age of 14 are treated in emergency rooms for sports-related injuries each year. It's frightening and ironic, considering that concern about children's safety is one of the reasons parents enroll them in organized sports.

Then, too, there's the potential for psychological harm. Though not as devastating as the possibility of physical injury or death, it's still very real and can also be life-altering. Many adults harbor continuing feelings of inadequacy resulting from early failures in sports and other physical activities. Since children have sports-related perceptions of their ability by first grade, we can see that these beliefs persist over quite a few years.

Finally, there's another reason why readiness matters: the very real possibility that children who are asked to perform tasks for which they're not ready will develop bad habits. For example, the child who doesn't yet know how to throw correctly isn't going to learn to throw correctly because he's pitching a couple of games a week. The child who runs with his feet pronated (feet rolling in with baby toes comign up off the ground) won't learn to run correctly simply by running. Rather, the chances are that these bad habits will become more ingrained over time, making it probable that the child will be unable to continue pitching or running.

But, you're thinking, don't the coaches teach the children how to perform these skills? Unfortunately, the answer is almost never. Many well-meaning coaches, after all, are simply parent volunteers who don't know the correct mechanics of the motor skills involved. Other coaches are so intent on winning games that they focus exclusively on the skilled players, leaving the less-skilled kids to fend for themselves. Either way, it's almost always the game that matters -- not fundamental skill development.

One of the great misconceptions about youth sports is the belief that children who are enrolled in organized programs are taught the skills needed to play -- or to become physically capable people. More often than not, children are instead thrust into playing situations, given instructions that make little sense to them, and expected to go to it. It's rather like taking a child who can't yet walk and trying to teach him to skip first.

These kinds of negative experiences can affect a child for years -- if not a lifetime -- whether we're talking about injury, perception of ability, or poor skill development. All of these possibilities are likely to produce a child who may have begun sports participation with the greatest of enthusiasm but soon is unable or unwilling to take part in any physical activity at all.