re: Is playing the same sport all year around too much for a child?

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Their whole life is baseball. They don't go on vacation. They don't do anything else. Their whole lives revolve around baseball. They play baseball every weekend and some during the week. Summer ball, fall ball, baseball baseball baseball.

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Some of my cousins' kids do this. The kid is like 12 or 13 and they all treat him like he's going to be a major league player. I'm nearly 60 and I had friends that did the same thing with their kids. It was really tough on them when they realized they weren't going to finish that dream life.

I went through a little of that. My parents never even pushed me to do it. My mom was a teacher that harped on my grades. I was just a slow 5'9" 165 lb. high school linebacker that liked hitting people. Looking back, I feel I was lucky to have lived in a small town. I played at the 2A & 3A level and got to be on the field for everything except field goal and extra point team. It was fun and by my senior year I knew grades were what was going to help me pay for college. Most people take high school and lower levels of sports way too seriously. Kids are supposed to have fun growing up.

Playing sandlot ball was much more fun that playing organized sports. Kids don't really do that anymore. No where to play because if a kid gets hurt the landowner might get sued. A man down our street had a big open field behind his house. He bush hogged it once a month during the summer and the neighborhood kids played baseball there nearly every day. We had three adjoining backyards where we played football. Two of the yards we played in belonged to people with no kids. They let us play because our parents wouldn't have sued them if we broke a leg in their yard.