The kid playing baseball who is super dedicated, part of a team, learning about hard work and sportsmanship is probably getting more out of his time than your elementary DC doing an hour of busywork HW a day...

Anonymous wrote:Must be white people answering sports

What world do you live in? Definitely not a white thing.

My kid is good at sports and school and is also great looking

Who is to say the kid playing baseball six days a week isn't also excelling in school? You have no idea what other families actually prioritize. My DD swims four days a week and also gets great grades.

Must be white people answering sports

Only in America. Ask this of any of my relatives in other countries and they would wonder if it was somehow a trick question.

Anonymous wrote:If you could choose one for your kid to excel at which would you choose? I feel like around here people push sports at the detriment of academics. Young kids practicing soccer or baseball 6 days a week. When do they have time to do homework?

My kids are young elementary and we do sports but they have daily homework usually 45 mins-1 hour and they have to have that done before they can do their sports. Sports practices are 2-3 times a week and a game on the weekend. We know people who supplement this with additional training on off days. And their kids are 8!

To be clear, doing 45-60 minutes of homework a day for young elementary school kids isn't "academics."

We have enough frumpy fat balding lawyers

Anonymous wrote:NP. My kids are young adults and the world has changed since we were young. Many of the exceptional athletes are also outstanding students.

Pro athletes are not typically outstanding students in the routine classroom settings. They have types of intelligence that non-athletes don’t have.

Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence refers to mind and body co-ordination.

AIQ, athletic intelligence quotient that includes visual spatial processing, long-term storage and retrieval, reaction time and processing speed. This would include other areas like ballet. The visual spatial processing seems to be one of the hardest skills. My daughter, a ballet dancer, is constantly complaining about having to dance with dancers who have poor skills in these areas.

Athletes are given more respect than they were 30 years ago. They get the academic support they need instead of just pushing them through.

My brother was a recruited football player. He had a learning disability that made it tough in college. No extra training back then, no parental involvement. The kids knew who was going to make it. A family member was a D1 lacrosse player and a pro but there’s not much money in it. And more than a handful of college hockey players in our family and friend group, some made it to the pros. One friend absolutely blew it for misconduct.

These players all had natural abilities in speed, strength, agility, endurance, born athletes. None of them were top scholars even though half of us had parents who went to Ivy League schools. They weren’t athletes. Nobody had it all.

I would choose academics over athletes . You can focus on sports every day after school and on weekends and it’s still doubtful that you will be recruited and go pro. But you can focus on academics intently and it will pay out.

NP. My kids are young adults and the world has changed since we were young. Many of the exceptional athletes are also outstanding students.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Academics. The world needs doctors, scientists, teachers, etc, not more baseball players.

To be fair, I’d rather have more baseball players than more lawyers , lobbyists, stockbrokers, etc.

About 30% of baseball players are coming from foreign countries, mostly Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico , Venezuela. It’s a tough to make it. And I’d rather there be more anything than attorneys, there’s a glut already.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Long term, I value academics over sports.

But at 8, I think pushing academics on kids can backfire. I would not choose a school that has that much homework at that age.

I agree with this. That said, as much as I like my kids to get exercise and fresh air and try to run them around outside most days, spending 4-5 days/week on a single sport at 8 years old doesn't seem like a good balance either. It seems like a parent trying to engineer a D1 athlete out of a 3rd grader or something.

It often seems like there's no moderation in the DMV on any childhood topic (academics, sports, languages, instruments, etc), and it's kind of frustrating.

I am the PP and I agree with you. My kids were spending many hours a day on sports at 8 but much more of that time was pick up basketball on the playground or going on bike rides or playing sharks and minnows in the pool.

It comes down to knowing your kids. My boys had disabilities that made school hard and frustrating. They enjoyed sports and it gave them a place to excel and feel good about themselves. We knew our kids would not be D1 or pro athletes but we also knew an elite school wasn’t in the academic cards. They still got their homework done. My family member has kids who only went to HS half-days to participate in their high level sport which I thought was insane. They still ended up recruited Ivy so I guess some people can have it all.

Anonymous wrote:Long term, I value academics over sports.

But at 8, I think pushing academics on kids can backfire. I would not choose a school that has that much homework at that age.

I agree with this. That said, as much as I like my kids to get exercise and fresh air and try to run them around outside most days, spending 4-5 days/week on a single sport at 8 years old doesn't seem like a good balance either. It seems like a parent trying to engineer a D1 athlete out of a 3rd grader or something.

It often seems like there's no moderation in the DMV on any childhood topic (academics, sports, languages, instruments, etc), and it's kind of frustrating.