{"id":37072,"date":"2010-12-30T11:31:20","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T16:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/?p=37072"},"modified":"2010-12-30T11:32:03","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T16:32:03","slug":"sports-training-for-infants-and-toddlers-may-be-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/12\/sports-training-for-infants-and-toddlers-may-be-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"Sports Training for Infants and Toddlers May be Dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Plenty\u00a0of\u00a0exercise is essential to the proper upbringing of children.\u00a0Active play and team sports are a great way to get your kid moving, but some people are suggesting that organized training should start younger than school age or even in toddlerhood. Babies as young as six months old are\u00a0exercising and using fitness DVDs. Is this\u00a0cutting-edge-genius or\u00a0is it\u00a0a classic case of good advice taken too far?\u00a0Doreen Bolhuis, a fitness coach from Michigan, has created GymTrix<\/a>. GymTrix provides babies and toddlers with the opportunity to develop sports-like skills\u00a0through exercise DVDs.<\/p>\n

Many professionals are against the idea of sports training for children<\/a> so young. Dr. Lyle Micheli has made no secret of his disdain for the trend. He sees no benefits to subjecting such young children to exercise DVDs. He actually fears that it may produce more\u00a0“overuse injury”\u00a0among children. Former NBA player Bob Bigelow gives his opinion as well, saying \u201cthis is Baby Mozart stuff; you play Mozart for the baby in utero and it comes out some sort of fine arts major,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are millions of American parents worried to death that their children might fall behind somebody else\u2019s kid. So the emphasis in youth sports has become more, more, more, younger, younger, younger.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with trying to coordinate an active lifestyle for your child. It seems only natural to start in infancy by taking them for walks and encouraging them to rollover, crawl, walk, run, jump and spin in circles. Team sports and family play-time are great bonding experiences as well as fabulous opportunities for exercise.<\/p>\n

My concern is that “active play<\/a>” in this case\u00a0could easily turn\u00a0into a nicer way of saying, “I expect my children to run faster, be stronger, and always win.” Kids face an enormous amount of pressure as it is and our unreasonable expectations can have a way of translating into harmful messages of insufficiency.<\/p>\n

Baby fitness DVDs may help eliminate the obesity epidemic but what good\u00a0will it do if we trade it in for something just as bad? Feelings of insufficiency can manifest terribly in the mind of a child. I just feel like\u00a0the whole idea is\u00a0dangerously close to a line that shouldn’t be crossed. What do you think? Will baby-fitness be among your family’s New Year’s Resolutions<\/a> or do you find the idea to be ludicrous?<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Via: The New York Times<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plenty\u00a0of\u00a0exercise is essential to the proper upbringing of children.\u00a0Active play and team sports are a great way to get your kid moving, but some people are suggesting that organized training should start younger than school age or even in toddlerhood. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1367,18],"tags":[314,3691,7072,7073,1250,3438],"class_list":["post-37072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-childrens-health","category-fitness","tag-childhood-obesity","tag-children-fitness","tag-doreen-bolhuis","tag-gymtrix","tag-sports","tag-workout-dvds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37072"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38749,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37072\/revisions\/38749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}