It is a joy to watch parents instill a love of fitness in their young children. I’m all for accompanying 9-month-olds to parent-baby swimming or gymnastics classes and enrolling 3-year-olds in ballet programs. My own children hiked, played basketball, swam, danced and ice skated before they began elementary school.

Children should love sports; they can have a positive influence on the rest of their lives. Sports encourage a healthy lifestyle, including good nutrition and positive personal decisions. Athletics teach confidence, poise, teamwork and, yes, an ability to compete for success in the future business world.

All those things are great to learn at a young age. But those wonderful first years of athletic participation are not the time to teach kids that sports are all about winning.

Young children who watch Sunday afternoon football with their parents can differentiate winning and losing and recognize the skills of individual players. It’s OK to support the Ravens or Redskins or Orioles or Nationals. It’s OK to know which player is most likely to hit a home run or make a game-winning basket.

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It is even acceptable that most children know who wins games in peewee leagues when no official scores are kept. But by having those leagues and maintaining those policies, we parents demonstrate that it is not important to us who wins a game among 7-year-olds. That’s what matters. Parents of elementary-age children need to reinforce that there is satisfaction in participating in sports, not just in excelling in them. Parents need to de-emphasize the issues of winning and losing in children who are just beginning to learn their own likes and dislikes.

We don’t need 6-year-olds counting on, or worrying about, college scholarships. We don’t need 6-year-olds who quit certain activities because they aren’t considered the best. And we don’t certainly don’t need little children focusing on one activity because they appear to have a “natural ability.”

Give them a chance to have fun before they are launched into a single focus for the remainder of their childhood.

Tiger Woods and Venus and Serena Williams are gifted athletes, no doubt about it. They focused on a single sport as soon as they learned to walk and things worked out quite well. Good for them. But there is a pretty short list of athletes who have become that successful after a parent chose their sport and built their lives around it. There’s a far longer list of children directed to a single pursuit who become disillusioned or who simply fail at some point. And all of them, even the Tigers and Venuses and Serenas of the world, lost out on something of value growing up. They never got to make their own choices about the paths of their lives.

So give elementary school-age kids a break.

The demand for skill development has condensed the period in which children can participate in competitive sports without becoming overly competitive.

By middle school, athletic competition escalates, whether parents like it or not. Youth football programs form A and B teams; club soccer teams advertise for “committed 11-year-olds”; and winter swim leagues skim off the fastest kids from the neighborhood pool leagues and put them in weight-lifting programs. By age 11, parents are positioning their children for high school and beyond. That’s when decisions are made about high-priced camps, trainers, gym memberships and year-round sports, all with delusions of future grandeur.

And the lessons get tougher from there. By high school, a lot of the best middle school athletes have been passed by bigger, stronger and faster athletes. And the recreation leagues are over at that point, limiting opportunities for relaxed competition.

Because of this shift toward younger expertise, children are weeded out of sports before they even grow into their adolescent bodies. Some who would have had a chance at high school or even college sports were just too gangly, slow or uncoordinated at age 10. Do we really want a lifetime of fitness decided at that age?

Ultimately, the trend toward baby jocks is about money. Parents believe that teaching children more at a younger age will better their skill development. They also believe marketing them younger and younger will contribute to their future earnings. But parents should look at the lessons of Hollywood and consider whether they want to become athletic stage parents. Most of it won’t lead to the spot they envision at the end of the road.

Effie Dawson writes about high school and youth sports.

Join the discussion and take our poll in today's examiNation Baltimore: What do you think of pushing young children into sports with the hopes of getting college scholarships?