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A lot of you have probably gone through what we are going through now. My DD7 is doing very well in competitive swimming and her coach wants to raise her commitments to 5 days/week (90 mins everyday).

Like others on the forum I do not see my kid becoming a professional athelte and as she gets older I cannot see this commitment escalating beyond this level. So I am having concerns if we want to do this.

What have others done to balanced sporting activity?

Weighing on our decisions:

*Need for unstructured time vs intense physical activity
*Bedtime and sleep (swimming practice around here starts at bedtime)
*What the "next level up" provides that the current one doesn't.
*Coaches and peers.
*Total cost

In our case, bedtime and the need for unstructured time outweighed the need for intense physical activity. When DD was 10, though, the tables turned, and we allowed her to try out for a club soccer team after we sorted out which clubs had a positive coaching approach.

I follow my DD's lead on these. I lay out that this is the opportunity, this is the commitment, and these are the opportunity costs (because obviously spending 450 minutes a week swimming means 450 minutes you can't be doing other activities, and when you factor in preparation and transportation times, the cost is even larger). If my DD is willing to make that commitment, I'm willing to support her.

Inevitably, whenever my DD has an activity that takes up this much of her time, she starts to growl about it, and we end up scaling back.

Just my opinion... but 7 is too young to be making that serious a commitment to competitive swimming.

My opinion is based on family experience: Both my kids (9 and 12) do year-round swimming, with a club in Atlanta that routinely turns out very, very talented swimmers. The senior kids are in the water, twice a day, just about every day of the week. Pretty crazy if you ask me, but they love it.

Even this club - which takes their training very seriously - recommends 3 practices a week for their youngest group (7 to 10 year olds). Maybe 4 times if you've got a kid that needs to burn off the energy, but 3 is fine. They take the long view... at this age, the point is to develop the love of the sport. The kids that are breaking records at 9 are not necessarily the ones still breaking records at 17.

We had this exact kind of situation and discovered the following: for our family, the important thing is not the size of the commitment, but the flexibility of the commitment.

So in soccer (at her particular club), there was little room for flexibility. If she missed a game or had an injury, it was a big deal to her teammates (she was keeper). If she missed practice, the coach wouldn't put her in to play. If she didn't participate year round, she was looked down on. It was a huge burden to our entire family because of the lack of flexibility. My daughter suffered several overuse injuries. She missed out on stuff she really wanted to do.

In swimming (in her particular club) there is lots of room for flexibility. She can go up to four times a week, but she doesn't have to go four times. She can decide to skip a practice because of a) the need to heal muscles in order to avoid injury b) massive homework c) other obligations d) other fun stuff. She moved from the third tier to the second tier team and the practices got a bit longer, but still flexible in terms of frequency. If there's a meet, she can sign up or not, do one race or several, etc. If she doesn't complete, it doesn't affect the other kids' ability to complete or to do well.

My daughter is super-athletic and loves to swim, so she's been going four times a week. But lately, she's been feeling really sore in her shoulders and a bit overwhelmed with schoolwork, so we are scaling back.

I agree. My almost 10 year old son plays competitive tennis and soccer, and even at his age group (10-12 year olds) the coaches still emphasize the love of the game more than the competition. Learning and loving the game, skills development, and participation are key until the kids are older. I'd have to have a discussion with the coach and find out more information before being willing to commit to something that serious at that age, at least for our family.

And I also agree with Ivy that flexibility is key. My son's soccer academy doesn't punish him for missing games or practice, they have flexible practices (available up to 4 nights per week, whatever is best for your family), and they emphasize the fun part of the game. Tennis is a little different because we decide which tournaments he plays in so we control the schedule, but even for practices his coach doesn't complain that he misses 1 of the 2 nights to go to soccer. (our family limits sports to 2 nights per week, so he only gets 1 of each per week)

I've told my son when he is 12 he can choose something to the exclusion of others, if he wants to even then. But I've read too many studies and spoken with an ortho acquaintance about the repetitive stress injuries showing up in very young children to let him do 1 thing, year round, with intensity at this this stage. JMHO anyway.

DS12 has also showed promise in competitive swimming, but has no desire at this point to swim year round and we've followed his lead.

He also plays soccer, but while he's fine and has fun, he's most likely not going to be a pro soccer player, or even play for high school, lol. Again, we follow his lead and sign him for rec soccer only if he wants to.

He is required to have SOME physical activity on a somewhat regular basis so he rides a bike and takes tennis lessons as well.

The first thing my spouse and I do when something like this comes up is determine together (parents only) what *our* limits are - how often are we willing to let our child be in practice vs having free time vs homework needs vs missing out on spending time with siblings and friends etc. We also take into consideration what we can afford in terms of expense as well as time - driving a child to practice back and forth plus to meets etc doesn't just impact the child, it impacts parents in a big way, as well as the siblings who aren't participating because the parent who's driving isn't doing something else with another child.

Once we have a good agreement on what we, as parents, can offer - then we get input from our child, although to be honest, none of our children, at 7, wanted that large of a sports commitment and a 5-day per week activity schedule.

Out of our three children, one is not into competitive athletics at all, one is very athletically talented (not just in one sport) and loves to compete, and the third is in between - not extremely athletic, certainly not talented, but she has a few sports that she really enjoys and she is driven to compete with herself.

Soooo..... my dd who is athletically talented and has a really competitive nature, also didn't self-choose one sport over another until she was around 8 years old. Prior to that she wanted to try anything and everything. In the meantime we knew other parents who's kids were starting team gymnastics at 3, living at the gym etc. Those same parents would tell us that to be truly competitive at gymnastics you had to start young - waiting would just put you so far behind the eight-ball you'd never catch up. Weeeelllll.... after a childhood of only taking one or two rec classes and totally goofing off with her bff during class, when she was 8 dd suddenly decided she wanted to try gymnastics, and guess what? She's doing great, competing at the same level as most of her friends who started back at 3. And it's a decision she made, not a decision that was made for her. The hard part for dd is that she is now at a place where she has to practice with her team a certain number of days per week, which means this year she had to give up another sport which she really enjoys - but it was easier (I think) for her to make that decision at 10 than it would have been at 7. And she made the decision - not her coach, and not her parents.

What is it like having your child practice a sport after school so much of the week? There are a lot of trade-offs. I do believe my child would be doing better academically at school if she didn't spend so much time at the gym. Is it an issue? Probably not at the moment because she's able to coast to a certain extent thanks to being smart. Am I going to be willing to put up with this for another 2-3 years or longer? I don't know. If she doesn't find a way to apply herself a bit more at school I may want to pull her back to less gym time. The other impact on our family is that it splits up what were once nightly family dinners. I think in some ways, for us, that's been ok - we have a bit of a split dinner, the kids and parent at home before dd gets home eat together, and the parent who does pick up eats with the gymnast when they get home. So each parent is having a bit of small-group family dinner and good quality time with part of our kids each night... but we're not getting that everyone-together-to-eat dinner in except on weekends, and I miss that. I also feel like dd's nights are very crammed-full-busy - she doesn't mind, but it would drive me nuts if it was me maintaining her schedule

polarbear

Another consideration is how obsessive the kid is. DD5 just started gymnastics this fall, and she is OBSESSED. She is also insanely good at it. I'm uneasy about it, but she's scheduled 4 afternoons a week. I NEVER thought I would schedule my 5-year-old that much, but she loves it.

At the same time, though, I'm keeping one finger hovering over the Eject button. I don't love the whole competitive gymnastics thing. And I really don't love how she's already getting too much of her sense of worth from being better than other kids. (My plan was to put her in gymnastics for a bit to get some tumbling skills, and then transition her to something like dance. Big tactical error.)

But for the moment, she has found her obsession, and I'm not going to stop her. Yet.

With my ds11 its baseball. With travel teams, little league and winter training it got to be way to much. Then you add on All-Star and a fall league, it ended up being year round. He also liked soccer and basketball because his friends were playing.

He often pitched and if his perfectionism showed its ugly head it just wasn't fun.

This year 5th grade started middle school we did cross country, basketball and now track and baseball at school. It is more manageable with a school schedule. It is also a new school so he needed to bond with the other boys out of the classroom.

Ds is good at baseball but with practices and 45 games in a season, rescheduling for rainouts we were constantly deciding what to skip.

My kids swam in a summer league a few years and during the summer there was practice every day but they only asked for kids to make it 3 days a week, for 6 weeks. Under 8's usually only swam for 45 minutes. There are two nationally ranked swim teams in town, and I don't really know how much they expect. But I know several kids who have ranked nationally, and in order for this to work out they did have to drop other activities and swim almost every day. Not sure they did that till the under 10 group (9 & 10 year olds).

I personally wouldn't have my child commit that much time to one sport at that age, but I do know people who do. Personally, I feel kids need more down time. There is always transportation time that has to be added in, time to do homework, and other activities.

Ivy,

Thanks for this perspective. Flexibility is definetely the key thing. I will request a slower start and then see a ramp up.

On a seperate note I was reading an article on how school sports in the US has moved away from enriching kids to focusing on the kids who will sports the main focus. It is a real sham.

I agree about the change in change in sports in the US. Part of it has to do with the cost of participation. A year of competitive soccer here is like $1800, plus uniforms and additional tournament fees. For that kind of money, people tend to expect a lot of... something. You want your money's worth, right? This unfortunately means that they push a lot on the kids and make everything very overkill and overdone. It also means that the very best athletes may not be represented or get the chance to complete because of the financial barriers to entry. My daughter's "A" team wasn't the best players... it was the best players who could afford the fees.

(As an aside, this is why I keep advocating for TAG funding for our state, even though we've opted out of the public schools for our daughter -- because every gifted child deserves an appropriate education, not just the ones who can afford to seek an alternative.)

Great thread. We cut back a lot in the last year or so due to dd7's recent need for vision therapy, and I am very reluctant to get her back into dance, in particular. It is a wonderful opportunity, absolutely, however with classes added to performances, and practice for performances (eg: nutcracker) it just adds up to several days a week and full saturdays very very quickly.
Tae kwon do was this way too; medium to large weekly commitment and year round with almost no breaks makes it something we are taking a break on until the kids are much older.

It's hard when you have your child in ballet to say, no we can't also do tap. Or, no, we can't commit to sleeping beauty, when it seems to her like ALL the other kids are doing it. But now I think she recognizes that the ballet thing was mainly to get some time on stage and that there are other ways to do that as well, and we are remaining firm on limiting all activities to a couple days a week.

Non-year round activities really help with being able to pick something new. Thankfully our rec soccer league here is very much oriented that way, so it is a good fit.

I mean if one of our children shows a real desire to master a sport, to the point of even practicing, stretching, reading about it a bunch at home, etc., then we might consider committing more, but otherwise we are keeping it fun and light.