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[quote=Anonymous]I know families where it is 100% driven by the child and I have know families where it is 100% driven by the parents.

I have known kids who lost privileges because they were not willing to do extra practice at home for a given sport even though they participated fully in practices and games. Their parents decided that the child should be motivated to work on skills at home. They didn't see that the child would have been fine in a rec league playing with fewer practices and that going out and practicing was not of interest.

And there are examples of excellent pro athletes that wanted nothing to do with the sport but were forced into it by a parent, Andrea Agassi comes to mind. You could almost see when the switch was flicked in his own head that he wanted to play tennis and his professional career, already very good, became amazing. But he was playing tennis because his Dad made him play tennis not because he loved tennis. I would argue that Michael Phelps is another example. He swam because he was good at it and because he struggled in school and other areas. But there is a bench at his home pool that he was regularly sent to because he was misbehaving at practice.

Obviously Agassi and Pheleps had amazing careers and are seen as successes but all you have to do is look at their stories and some of the fall out from their careers and you can see that their talent was massive but their drive might not have been all that we thought it was.

I have a friend whose kid is a great swimmer, he loves it. He has made it to Junior Olympics and swam well there. He is unfortunately very sick and cannot swim and it kills him. He actively misses the pool. And I know kids who feel the same about soccer, baseball, tennis and other sports. I have a friend whose daughter is loving Tae Kwon Do and willing to do the extra work to be on the demonstration team and compete. She also loves her swim team and dance.

So I know that there are the self driven kids and that is great. But I also know that there are other kids whose parents make them play when they don't want to but they succeed because they have the talent and they get the positive attention then want from Mom and Dad when they do well in their sport.

And I have no clue how to tell which is which from a distance without knowing the individual kid.

I do know that when offering up sports, my child will choose baseball and soccer but baseball games always win out in a conflict. This season we old him he had to choose baseball or soccer, because there were too many game conflicts and it wasn't fair to his teammates to keep missing games. He choose baseball. But he is 6 so we are not worried about travel ball. And he is not interested in playing catch or practicing hitting in the back yard so we leave it be. [/quote]

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