Trying to understand which sports needs early start. we started piano little late and felt like we should have started early based on my kid’s interest and progress.
Thanks for your response
My D22, who has been playing the violin since 3 (but has recently moved away from it a bit), says that starting early is important to develop fine movements (“1mm makes a big difference”), listening skills (pitch, rhythm and distinguishing different aspects of music) and ability to play in a group.
Enjoy your child. Follow her lead. And recognize that she will be who she will be, and that your decisions on what activities she does or even to some extent what elementary school she attends will have little bearing on that. As @MaineLonghorn says, keep your eyes open for mental health issues (especially in HS and college) and, as others have said, for LDs.
Enjoy more, worry less, be your kid’s advocate, but allow them to deal with setbacks and consequences of their actions.
My biggest regret is that we weren’t more insistent on housework and chores from an earlier age.
Most importantly, love the kid on the couch and try to manage your expectations. Be supportive, but realistic. Take family trips and don’t bring friends along. Be in touch with extended family. Learn to enjoy their interests (I still recall the enormous Pokemon tournament at a local mall I took my son to when he was about 10; joy for him but misery for the adults as it was incredibly crowded and disorganized).
Not sure why sports at a higher level are so often denigrated here, but other time consuming activities like music (traveling for and spending many hours per week to play in a “better” youth orchestra, hours of practice per week) or dance are not. I have seen a number of athletes, especially girls, exceed expectations on college acceptances due to their sport (mostly lacrosse). While I don’t know the academic record of these student-athletes, my kids are aware of who is in the top classes and who are not.
I have three kids. One was into scouts and band, one into theater and played rec level soccer, and the third played on a travel team for many years and was also involved in other ECs to some extent. The oldest did not have access to video games, any TV except for PBS, and no smart phone until an adult. He read constantly. The youngest had much more of that but still much less than his friends. Yet the oldest is the one that is pretty much addicted to the computer and doesn’t read much at all (also has some mental health challenges that feed into this).
The sporty one still plays his sport as an adult and, while he plays his share of video games, is not glued to a screen at all times. We agreed to let him play travel, because he loved it and liked playing on a higher level team with kids that understood the sport and cared about doing well. We never, and his teammates never, believed they were headed for D1 or for a professional career (except for that age when many boys believe they will pitch in the majors or be the QB in the super bowl). Yes, we spent a fair amount of time in the car traveling to games (but half of them were at home), but it did not stop us from Sunday dinners with grandparents, bike rides, game nights or family movies. Yes, there was a cost but it was not outrageous and we enjoyed the rare weekend tournament trips. Much less than the cost of weekly vocal or piano lessons they also had.
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If you are aiming at high levels, I would guess any sport that has skill is best learned early. Starting soccer at 13 will usually mean not reaching a high level of play later on. I would think hockey is similar.
But playing a sport at young ages is best done for fun. I strongly believe one reason my son is a good soccer player is that he played with his older brothers in the backyard (in addition to playing on a team). Unstructured.
Also – and this isn’t aimed at parents of 5 year olds – it is crucial to guard against burnout! Something I rarely saw parents focus on.
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This was aimed at Tigerle, the system somehow replied it to Ohm.
I just disagree that learning a FL is hard. Or that fluency is the point of this suggestion.
To me, I always felt learning a FL was/is like a game. Learn the pieces (words/phrases,) learn the rules, go for it. Younger, I thought of it as a sort of secret code. Fun. In it’s own way, priceless. I was exposed to Russian and French, informally. I could hold a conversation. Lol, I spoke like a 5 year old because I was 5 years old. That’s all anyone expected, at that age.
With our kids, we were not aiming for full mastery of the FL. Just as many parents are not preparing their kids for Junior Olympics or a local youth orchestra, at that age.
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Kindasorta. That’s one possibility, though it may actually be that simply learning one’s first language(s) does that equally well—we don’t entirely know for certain (even though we thought we did a couple decades ago).
My primary research focus is language and aging, and even though I don’t work in the acquisition side of the issue, I have to keep up on that research literature, so: There is certainly an age effect in language acquisition, probably because the human brain has a higher degree of plasticity in early childhood than later in life. However, the idea that language acquisition can only fully occur if it was begun in childhood is based in some fairly simplistic studies that, while they were well designed to test certain things with regard to age, did not test the full complement of what’s involved in language acquisition.
It turns out, given what we’ve learned since the turn of the century, that it’s actually much more complicated than a simple early exposure=good/late exposure=bad sort of thing. For one simple example, some parts of language acquisition seem to happen more easily early on, but some later in life. Also, there is a lot of interindividual variation, and this appears to be grounded in both developmental factors as well as stuff as hard to quantify as intrinsic motivation.
And that’s not even to mention the issues of what a “native speaker” of a language actually is, anyway.
So the TL;DR is that the relationship between age and language acquisition is real, but what exactly that relationship is turns out to be way more complicated than anyone wants it to be.
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What is “a kid with selective-college potential?”
You’re on College Confidential, asking for advice in raising this child with hopes to get said child into a “selective” college, and your child is 5! So, yes, you are obsessing over college admissions.
Wtih one in college, and two about to leave, I would urge you to just focus on raising a happy, healthy child who knows they are loved. Cherish every moment. Take pictures and video. Encourage what they love. Expose them to the world through books, music, and visits to museums, but not with college as your goal.
Most of the kids we know who are at or going to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. weren’t pushed. Their parents didn’t set out to create the child who would get in. These kids gravitated to what they loved, whether it was math, computer science, violin, and even community service. One set of parents we know were so hands-off that they didn’t take their child to the math placement test at the start of school, so he was in lower math for years. This child eventually took it upon himself to self-study, take AP exams, get the school to make a very rare exception and move him up. He will be attending Stanford.
We also know a set of parents who planned their kid’s life from kindergarten on with the goal of attending an “elite” school. That child was taken out of every sport when it was clear he wouldn’t be the very best. He engaged in activities solely for his “resume.” His parents were hyper-involved in everything he did. He eventually ended up at a very good school (though not the ones they shot for), where he let loose and became quite the partier.
Anyway, you’ll do what you want, but my opinion is that you should get off CC for now. And, also know that the route to a successful life doesn’t need to include a “selective” college. Look at Warren Buffet. And, I don’t think I’m being hypocritical because a couple of my kids applied to selective colleges (and I’ll admit to having gotten caught up in the anxiety of this admissions cycle at times). I told my kids since they were young that it is what you do not where you go that will determine your success in life.
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Great read (funny to boot): French kids don’t throw food (not exact title, writing from memory).
Starts with the (American) writer with toddler in restaurant in France. All kids more or less behave, theirs is the only one making a nuisance of herself. Thus the start of an adventure to learn what it takes to raise a kid who’ll eat almost everything and sit nicely at a dinner table.
Eating dinner with family every day certainly helps 
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“French children don’t throw food”. Good read, though I like “French kids eat everything” even better.
I’m thinking 5 is good time to sign up for SAT classes
let her be a child, don’t be a helicopter parent, let her get dirty, let her figure out what she likes by trying different activities.
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By the way, the French secret is: you don’t “model”, you make them. French parents tell their kids what they want them to do, and mean it. And they have to learn to eat their greens, or there will be no dessert! 
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Perhaps the most important thing parents can do for the future college potential of a 5-year-old kid is to make the financial plan for the kid’s college (with assumptions of rising costs) and act on it.
Most students will be limited in the college choice (or if they can even attend college) by their parents’ financial circumstances and choices; their own achievement and merit will matter only within their parents’ financial constraints.
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#1 in the do right category - Get jobs, preferably those they get on their own merits and not through your connections, while in high school and give them responsibility for at least one “bill” (their own gas money, texting package - we predated the standard unlimited plans - etc.) But, you don’t need to worry about this for a 5 yo
Four other things that turned out to be “right” - 1. absolutely no video games in the house, and since one is now an engineer for a FAANG company, I don’t think it affected her tech savvy. 2. Start saving and limit college choices, when the time comes, to what’s affordable. 3. Don’t start thinking about college until end of sophomore yr of hs. 4. Don’t get in over your head financially on kid activities. Yep, it’s great when your kid makes the team, but that $ is not an investment.
My colleague, chair of the music department, who would absolutely not touch a kid before his or her voice matured, said if you wanted music exposure to start with piano. We did that. My parents did that for me, and I never regretted knowing to read music. Only extra activity I ever “made” them do.
@MYOS1634 I agree that you “know” quite early when you have an athlete. Youngest needed hours of physical activity to wind down so she’d sleep (an no, no ADD). She was always in some kind of sport and still holds her college’s record for her event.
Big don’t - trying to do too much. I wish I’d given my kids more down time.
2nd big don’t - planning. You know the expression, humans plan, God laughs. Five is too young to join the rat race.
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To answer the question more directly – I wish’d we’d paid more attention to who they were, as little people, than who we assumed/expected they’d be. And I wish we’d listened more, prodded less.
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Or, depending on the preferences of your child, percussion (which is a lot more than just banging on drums).
After a single summer playing soccer (which she hated beyond words), my D23 started out musically on percussion in elementary school—though not age 5!!—at her request, which ended up including several years of both tuned and untuned percussion, along with a lot of music theory. (Hey, it was bound to happen, her teacher is a jazz multi-instrumentalist, though mainly a drummer😁.) From there she got into songwriting and arranging, and since the pandemic began she’s been working mainly on building up her keyboarding skills with her teacher, and just started taking guitar lessons online from someone else.
And all that experience and interest in music has led her to build a low-fi home recording studio, and her goal now is to go into recording tech (for which college is actually an opportunity to line up structured internships as much as or more than to learn course material, but that’s a discussion for another thread). But if we’d tried to start an antsy 8-year-old on the violin or (heaven forfend!) the piano? Nah, she’d’ve hated music and all it stood for.
Which brings me back to one thing I rushed past earlier in this comment: “at her request”. Let your kid guide you. Let them change their mind and decide, like mine did, that even though their friend likes soccer it certainly isn’t what they consider a pleasant afternoon. They’re a human being with independent wants and desires, and that means that you’re not ultimately going to be able to mold them into what you want—so maybe let them figure it out and let you know rather than trying to create a machine “with selective-college potential”. (And if you’re really, really lucky, you may end up with a kid like mine who has the stats of such a machine but has no desire to attend the HYPSMs of the world. Very nice result for cashflow, that is.)
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In our school system, band started grade 5 and percussionists were “strongly encouraged” to have had piano lessons first!
@dfbdfb Interesting that as a percussionist, she did not like soccer! My college soccer player, when he had discovered drums in grade 4, announced he’d finally found something he loved as much as soccer. He played orchestral and jazz percussion (and marching band, which was required in order to play in jazz band), and planned to continue jazz percussion in college ( though did not). We know lots of percussion/soccer kids, the whole using your feet to play an instrument/control a ball, thing clicked for them.
But how wonderful for her, that her percussion led to new paths in music!
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The one thing you should be doing right now is saving for college. Saving even $100 a month in a 529 plan will open up way more doors and college options than any extracurricular activity right now. In some states, 529 contributions are tax deductible up to a certain amount. Trust me. This is what the parents of 5 year olds need to be doing above all else. I have a kid who was competing at national championships in a sport as a 6 year old. I did prepaid tuition at a school there is no chance he will go to from the time of his birth. He quit the sport in high school after major success and all of a sudden I had to come up with a new plan to pay for college.
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Exactly. According to Northwestern Mutual, 15 years from now “Be ready to pay $182,528 for a state school or a whopping $414,704 for a private college.”
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On college-savings: please know that there is no shame in realizing that a 529 plan won’t work for your family’s overall financial situation. If a 529 doesn’t make sense for your family, then whatever savings you can put aside for post-secondary education or training (even if it can only be dollar bills in a shoebox under your bed) will still be a good thing.
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