Hope for Parents of Late Bloomers and a Warning for Parents of High Achievers
Today I listened to a highly insightful podcast embedded within an article titled the The Late-Bloomer Advantage in Sports.
I highly recommend all sports parents read this article and listen to the podcast embedded within it.
In short, the conclusion is simple. Parents and coaches do a bad job understanding relative age. This causes them to often mistake early biological maturity for high potential and talent. Therefore, young athletes who have matured biologically faster than chronologically get highly structured mechanical coaching that hurts them in the long run.
In contrast, young athletes who develop biologically later in their youth tend to specialize less and are allowed to develop well rounded athletic skills. Research now shows that this is an advantage for these so called late bloomers. Specifically, this advantage is due to the fact that late bloomers avoid over coaching and the parental pressures that come with it.
Undoubtedly, this implies that over coaching and specialization for all young athletes regardless of their biological or chronological maturity is a mistake.