How Much Is Too Much

I was surfing the web, looking for an idea for my column this week, and Time magazine dropped an idea right into my lap. The magazine's cover article is on kids who are overloaded with sports.

This has been a major issue for me for a long time (yeah, I'm jumping on my soap box). Who benefits from a child who is over-involved in sports?

The child? As the Time article says, if a kid wants to compete on a travel team or more intense level, they've got to give a good chunk of their lives to their sport.

The parent? On a parents' list I read, a couple of parents were hoping their kids' teams would lose early in their July 4th weekend tournaments because they wanted to do other things over the holiday.

The family? Somebody's activities have to come first; somebody's has to come second; someone has to get put on the back burner. In a multi-child home, somebody is going to lose out. The losers aren't always the kids, either.

For some kids, it is true love of the sport, and those are the kids, from my experiences, who manage to find a healthy balance between their sport and other responsibilities. (Dancers I've known are very good at this juggling act.) But there are way too many kids who are signed up for everything because they don't know how to say "enough is enough," nor do the parents.

I would love for my son to experiment with many sports. What keeps me from signing him up for everything under the sun are two major issues: he isn't always interested in the sports I'd like him to play and I'm not going to spend all my non-work time in a car, driving him around. Am I selfish? You bet. But there are four people who live in my house, and we all need to learn to give and take. That means we don't have a child taking 40 hours of dance lessons a week, nor do we have a child running from field to field every night.

Call me sentimental, but I miss the days of pick-up baseball or football and when nobody had a mountain of brightly colored t-shirts with a corporate logo on the front and vinyl number ironed on the back.

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