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Avoiding the pediatrician's error: how neuroscientists can help educators (and themselves)

Nature Neuroscience volume 5, pages 1031–1033 (2002)Cite this article

Suppose a pediatrician found a website showing growth curves for children, and observed that by age 14 on average, boys reach 93% of their adult height and 75% of their young adult weight. Suppose he inferred from the growth chart that the period of fastest physical growth, from 2 to 14 years, is a critical period for physical training, the period during which such training has maximal impact. During this critical period, he might argue, children develop strength and agility most easily, and the athletic skills and muscle fibers developed during these years would stay with them forever. Nature provides parents a unique biological window of opportunity to maximize their children's athletic prowess. If you want your child to be a scratch golfer, the child must be on the range by age 2. Suppose the pediatrician began advising parents to have their children engage in strenuous physical activity and athletic training as early as possible. Worse yet, assume that these speculations caught the fancy of journalists, educators, policy makers, and anxious parents. Forget the swing set; no backyard should be without Baby Schwarzenegger leg-press machines and treadmills. As the pediatrician tells journalists, “Who's the idiot who said kids should not start throwing curve balls until they were at least 12 years old?”

Serious scientists, committed to applying research to improve child development, would likely be perplexed by such ill-founded recommendations and frustrated by the public's acceptance of them. Everyday experience—chronic injuries in young tennis players, brain damage from heading the ball in young soccer players, and so forth—as well as decades of research in sports medicine, would seem to support a considerably more moderate recommendation.

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  1. the James S. McDonnell Foundation, 1034 Brentwood Blvd., Suite 1850, St. Louis, 63117, Missouri, USA

    John T. Bruer

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Bruer, J. Avoiding the pediatrician's error: how neuroscientists can help educators (and themselves). Nat Neurosci 5 (Suppl 11), 1031–1033 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn934

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