Yeah. 5 is too old to take your first gymnastics or dance class for fun around here; my kids were embarrassed because their skills were not even close to those of the preschoolers who'd had 2-4 years of weekly lessons already. The teachers didn't even know what to do with a kid who was so behind.
Along those lines, I worked at a skating rink on weekends for a year, and you do not want to know about the parents and their miserable offspring. There was a girl doing a gorgeous axel during free skate one evening, and I complimented her to her mother. Mom was frowning. She said that the daughter was only doing "all right" (I was told that she had merely placed second at a recent competition). I started to watch them. The girl didn't look happy on the ice and the mom was frowning the entire time.
I've seen parents go out onto the ice to yell at their kids for not doing a perfect jump or spin. I've seen kids struggling for weeks to land a jump and then not smiling when they finally do.
The day I started, the other teachers told me to stay in the middle of the rink on report card days so that the parents couldn't complain to me about not passing Little Johnny or Little Susie from alpha to beta (or whatever). When some kids failed, their parents would sign them up for the next level anyway. I remember one of the teachers once had a whole class of kids in Freestyle 2 who should have repeated Freestyle 1.
