Get Your Kids Active and Stay Active With Sports

Children need kid friendly activity that help their young bodies to develop and grow properly and healthy. When children don’t participate in sports and active play or do participate with out down time we run the risk of children that are overweight, disinterested in sports play activity, emotional burn out and possibly set up for injury in the over extended youth athlete.

Development  And Growth For The Youth Athlete

The development of the total child needs a variety of experiences and opportunities to grow properly. Food, water, schooling, rest and relaxation all need to be dosed in balanced. To much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing very fast. Sports can be like this with out a check and balance system. To many times a child and his parents can become discouraged because the child isn’t the “star” of the team. Truly just look around most of us aren’t stars. Why do we place this unrealistic expectation on our children? What happened to fun and more fun in sports participation? Many children at an early age show promise and a measure success but as the other children grow and mature some of these children move to the middle of the pack making room for others to achieve higher levels of competiton.

We must remember, that children are growing as a result a child’s coordination becomes temporarily awkward. Many kids, in fact, become worse at sports during puberty before settling into their new bodies. Girls have in addition new bodies to grow use to.

Experts Weight In

Many youth sport experts agree that the youth athlete should not participate more than 15 hours/week for most sporting activities. They should change the sport or have a down time between sports. This means that a year round of any sport is to much for the majority of children and in the long run simply not in the child’s best interest.

With that said, far to many children ages 1-5th grade are not getting enough activity. Brain Grasso of IYCA believes that all children 3-5th grade should be involved in some organized sport per season. In addition some informal activity daily is important with family members and friends. This is just not happening. To many times the parents unfortunately are the leaders of inactivity and the ultimate abuse of sorts of their own children through no direction for proper eating or exercise.

Just give Um’ Some Balance

Almost all youth activities traditional sports as well as dancing, , chess, cheerleading to name a few, in the American youth life has the ability to become unbalanced and potentially hurtful for our youth athlete. Just as hurtful are the hours of TV and electronic games. Parents first need to gain perspective and then learn how to implement a healthy amount of exercise along with better food choices.

You can get more from TrackMom, Dr. Lorraine Johnson at her site, TrackMom.com.