Take a walk through your local park, and you will probably find 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds playing organized sports. There’s a coach, cones, and they’re running drills. Parents sign their kids up because their neighbor, classmate, or best friend is doing it. And so it begins, the rush to play organized sports, mainly because we don’t want our kids to be left behind.

But the truth is that if parents understood some basic principles about how the brain and body work, they would delay organized sports and delay specializing. As David Epstein, author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene: Inside The Science Of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, said, “It’s like teaching our kids grammar before they have learned how to talk.”

We asked Epstein about what parents need to know about sports specialization. Here’s what he had to say.

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