My eight-year-old granddaughter Lily is on a Soccer team and practices and plays regularly. She is not particularly athletic but her parents thought it would a good experience for her with the emphasis, as it should be on fun, fitness, and friends. But my son, who serves as assistant coach, also complains about how intense some of the parents get about the game. These parents criticize the coach and even their own children in front of their friends. Such parents make the game torture for their own children and uncomfortable and unpleasant for everyone else.

Putting young children in organized team sports has become the norm in the United States. It is estimated that almost 80% of children in the US participate in some form of organized sports. And this is happening at younger and younger ages. So called T Ball is a case in point. Little League organizers were concerned that they were losing prospective players to soccer, a game that could be played by younger children. To get children into baseball earlier they introduced T Ball in which the ball is not pitched to the batter but is rather placed on a stationary T. Even young children can hit a ball when it is not moving. Some T Ball teams involve children as young as four, and some soccer teams do as well.

When I ask parents of young children why they put them on teams at an early age, the most frequent answer is, “All the other children in the neighborhood are on the team, and if my son (daughter) is not on the team he or she won’t have any friends to play with.” And so long as the children are having fun and not being asked to do anything that might put their bodies at risk, participation in sports at an early age need not be problem. In reality, it is really just an organized, group play date. It is only when parents and coaches get too enthusiastic and become more concerned about the game than about the children playing it, that sports for children become a problem.

It is simply a fact that young children’s bones are not fully calcified and their muscles have not attained full volume. Vigorous sports can severely stress undeveloped bones and muscles. In the emergency room of Boston’s Children’s Hospital, hundreds of children are seen each month as a result of sports injuries. In addition to the physical risk, there are psychological risks as well. A child who has been playing soccer or baseball since the age of four or five, may burn out by the time her or she is an adolescent, an age when he or she might well excel at the sport.

Some parents tell me that they need to put their children in sports early in order to excel when they get older. But there is no more truth in this than in the idea that early academics will give young children an edge when they get older. It is interesting in this regard that while we have more than three million young people in Little League an increasing number of players in the Major Leagues are from the Caribbean, Latin American or Asia. In those countries (at least until recently) young people played the game on their own and for fun. That appears to be the real road to later excellence in sports.