Early and Late Bloomers in Youth Sports: Lessons for Parents

Guessing Game

For many children who experience early athletic success the reason is that they are so-called "early bloomers": children who simply develop ahead of their peers physically and/or psychologically, not that they are gifted athletes.

As a 2004 article in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance observes, because athletic success involves multiple factors, including genetics, mental attitude, access to training, and money, any attempt to predict future achievement based on how skilled your daughter is at age nine, ten or eleven "is likely to be futile." Each child follows her own unique developmental timetable. While chronological age provides a rough index of developmental level, differences among children of the same age can be and often are great. In other words, as one expert observes, while "development is age related, it is not age dependent."

Research suggests that only one in four children who are star athletes in elementary school will still be stars when they reach high school. Predicting whether a preteen athlete will be a good enough high school athlete to land a college scholarship or even influence the admissions process is thus almost impossible.

Advantages for Early Bloomers

Yet, the sad but unfortunate fact is that an early bloomer enjoys advantages that can continue long after peers have caught up and, in many cases, passed him in terms of skill proficiency.

An early bloomer tends to receive:

• more positive reinforcement and encouragement from adults;

• earlier and more extensive socialization into sports;

• access to better coaching, facilities, and competitive experiences (i.e., places on "select teams") and

• the benefit of a "residual bias" from being viewed as a talented athlete at an early age.

As a 2004 article in the Journal of Sports Behavior observes, "Early selection for elite sport participants [thus] can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for athletes and coaches. Players begin to think of themselves as talented and are thus likely to invest more time and effort into their sport with predictable results. As the identity of previously selected players becomes known to coaches and administrators, they watch those players more closely lest they miss an elite performer."

Downsides to being early bloomer

Although numerous advantages are conferred on an early bloomer, if your child experiences early success in sports, such success also has some downsides.

An early bloomer:

• is able to exploit his or her physical ability without having to work as hard at developing skills as less precocious players in order to stay competitive. When they catch up physically, they may end up being better players.

• often has to try to live up to heightened expectations; this may lead him to practice and play more than his young body can handle in order to live up to his reputation. Playing under this kind of pressure often leads to burnout and overuse injuries.

• may define himself by whether he wins or loses; if he or she is unable to maintain the success he had early in his athletic career, if that self-image is shattered, the results can be disastrous and may lead her to quit sports altogether.

• may tempt her parents to push her to specialize too early and/or train too hard. Excessive training too often leads to burnout and/or overuse injuries, some of which don't show up until high school or college but can be traced to excessive training when the player was nine, ten or eleven. Parents need to avoid being lulled into valuing short-term success more than their child's long-term future. If they don't, they may be placing their child's physical safety and emotional health at risk.

Parenting Late Bloomers: Emphasize Skill Development

If your child is an average athlete or lags behind his peers, he may be a late bloomer. Late bloomers receive markedly less social support and reinforcement from parents, coaches, and peers. Worse, the adults charged with the responsibility of evaluating "talent" - most of whom don't understand developmental variability in children - may unfairly nip her athletic career in the bud by concluding that he or she lacks the potential to play sports at the highest competitive levels. Denied a place on a select, middle school, or high school sub varsity team, the late bloomer is more likely to drop out of sports rather than keep playing until he blossoms (that is, achieves his full athletic potential).

Here are six important lessons for parents of potential late bloomers:

1. Take a balanced approach. Do not to get too down if your child is not immediately a superstar or too high if he is. The important thing is that he continues to play, to develop and learn new skills.

2. Emphasize the process and the journey, not the results achieved; therefore,

3. Avoid praising the outcome and instead praise effort;

4. Help your child see herself as a whole person, not just as an athlete;

5. Be realistic about possible reasons for early athletic success. Make sure your child understands that early success is not a guarantee of future success (and vice versa).

6. Select a sports program that understands child development. Pick a program that recognizes that variability in the way children's athletic talent develops by offering all children a chance to play as long as they want to.