less likely to become involved with drugsWITH A MARATHON BEST OF 2:26:40, Kim Jones was one of this country’s finest racers at the height of her career. But the running accomplishment she’s most proud of isn’t a race or a time; it’s her daughter, Jamie.
After a solid high school career that included a state championship and a top 10 national ranking, Jamie headed off to a promising career as a freshman at the University of Colorado. “I always tried to be very careful,” says Jones of raising her daughter as a runner, “because I knew that she had the talent to be great.”
As it turns out, Mom’s caution and careful attention paid off. Jones provided a textbook case of how to do everything right when it comes to raising a daughter who runs. Jamie started running in first grade for a series of short races held within the school system. “They never ‘trained,’ they just played,” Jones recalls. “The races were a mile or so on the grass in the park.” Jamie showed promise early, clocking a 5:50 mile in grade school and winning the citywide race. But Jones made sure that Jamie stayed active in other sports, including softball, volleyball, and basketball. “I encouraged her in everything, in those other sports as much as anything. Deep down, I was hoping that she’d go for running, but I never directed her that way.” As it turned out, Jamie chose the sport on her own, deciding after middle school to focus on running.
Keeping athletics fun, encouraging a child in all areas, and staying involved as she grows up are important aspects of support echoed over and over again by experts in youth fitness. Jones was on the right track in all those areas. As proof, her highest praise comes from perhaps her harshest critic: Jamie herself. “She helped me so much,” says Jamie, who hopes to become a professional runner and beat Mom’s times someday. “I never felt pressured when I was young. I learned so much just from watching her.”
What children learn from watching their parents is, in fact, crucial. But what a lot of them are seeing clearly isn’t good: It’s estimated that half the children in the United States participate in virtually no physical activity whatsoever.
Childhood today is simply less conducive than ever to physical activity. Computer games, the Internet, and, of course, television keep children glued to their bottoms during their recreational hours. Schools have cut budgets that funded physical education programs. Cars have become the normal way to get around; bicycles and walking, the exception. Households in which both parents work have become typical, so children are more likely to spend their time indoors in a day-care setting. Neighborhoods where people don’t know one another and a general fear of crime and violence mean that children are less likely than ever to be outdoors when they’re at home—even in the best neighborhoods.
The result is a generation of children growing up unfit and overweight. “In our part of the world, obesity is the number one chronic health problem,” says Oded Bar-Or, M.D., director of the Children’s Exercise and Nutrition Centre and professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “And it’s getting worse and worse.” In fact, in the United States, the number of overweight children and adolescents has doubled in the last few decades.
Dr. Bar-Or points out that exercise is the simplest solution to that growing problem: The more physically active a child is, the less likely it is that she’ll become overweight. That’s no small thing. In fact, the direction a child takes early on can have lifelong implications. Heart disease, which remains the leading cause of death in the United States, has been shown to begin in childhood. And on the positive side, introducing children as young as 2 years old to healthy exercise and nutrition habits has been shown to have lasting effects into adulthood.
Beyond the obvious physical impact, girls in particular benefit from physical activity in ways that can affect them for the rest of their lives. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation in East Meadow, New York, girls who participate in athletics are:
less likely to become involved with drugs
less likely to engage in sexual activity
less likely to get pregnant
more likely to graduate from high school and college
more likely to have higher than average grades
“Girls who do sports are able to look at their bodies in a different way,” says Lynn Jaffee of the Melpomene Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota, which specializes in girls’ and women’s health. “Instead of viewing it as a question of How thin am I? or How pretty am I? it’s, How strong am I? How fast am I? They view the body as a competent thing rather than only as an object of attractiveness.”
Those benefits continue beyond the teen years. The Women’s Sports Foundation also reports that women who participated in sports as girls demonstrate higher than average confidence, self-esteem, and pride in their physical appearance. They are also less likely to suffer from depression.
When should you encourage your child to become active? The earlier the better. A 1989 study showed that if a girl doesn’t participate in sports by the time she’s 10 years old, there’s only a 10 percent chance that she’ll be active in athletics when she’s 25. This may be changing slowly with the greater numbers of women discovering sports and the greater acceptance of older women in sports. But clearly, the earlier your daughter becomes active, the better off she is physically, mentally, and emotionally.
That doesn’t mean that you should take your child to the track and start timing her as soon as she can walk. In fact, forget “running” altogether, at first. For youngsters, being active is the goal, not being competitive. Going to extremes and pushing too early can have a counterproductive effect. It’s been shown that children who specialize in a particular sport early are more likely to become injured. And rather than getting a head start on athletic glory, many find their later athletic careers become truncated due to physical or emotional burnout.
So ditch the stopwatch and focus on fun. Physical activity for children needn’t be—shouldn’t be—structured until they are at least in middle school. Instead, sports should remain play. That way, it becomes a regular part of daily life. Here are some ways to incorporate healthy pastimes into your child’s routine as she grows.
Play outdoors. It’s important to get your child into this habit early on. Setting this pattern early might help avoid a video-game habit later.
Be creative with activity. Tossing a ball, doing somersaults, and jumping in leaf piles are examples of fun pastimes that build coordination.
Encourage natural child’s play. Child’s play is, after all, pretty much running around. “When I was brought up, my mother would shove us out the door and we’d run around the fields,” recalls Priscilla Welch, of Tabernash, Colorado, whose world-best 2:26:51 marathon as a masters runner ranks among the sport’s greatest performances. “But it was playtime, not hard miles on the roads.”
Kim Jones recalls a similar experience. “I grew up in a household of 11, and we had to share one bike,” she says. “If we wanted to go to the beaches, which were a mile or so away, we would just run. It wasn’t training—it was all natural.”
Engage in low-key contests. A backyard can be the perfect training ground for building lifelong active habits and sportsmanship. Races, tag, ball games—just about any outdoor activity that entails moving around is all the running a young child needs. “The goal shouldn’t be fitness at a young age but rather to have fun,” says Susan Kalish, former director of the American Running Association. “If they always have fun with it, they’ll always do it. You don’t want young children to think of exercise as work or to have the upsetting connotations of not meeting performance goals.” Welch concurs: “When you take children by the collar and structure them seriously, that’s how you lose them.”
Play with your children. Ask them to teach you the outdoor games they play in school. Invite their friends over in order to have a baseball or touch football game.
Be a good role model. Experts say that one of the best ways you can ensure that your children get exercise is by setting a good example. At this age, children are sponges, witnessing and mirroring your actions and values. Now’s the time to show them your health is a priority to you. Seeing you include running, cycling, or walking in your day will help your children think of physical activity as the norm.
Turn family outings into active fun. Take your child on walks, hikes, and bicycle outings; all are great family activities at this age. Be sure to let your child set the pace. “I started running with my daughters while they were on their bikes,” Kalish says. “Then they started running when they wanted to. We go as long and hard as they want, and we play a lot of games. We might race to the creek. But if they want to stop and catch tadpoles, then we stop. I’m very careful not to push them. And I let them take the lead, literally going in front of me. That way, they stop when they want to.”
As the marathon has grown in popularity, some children have shown interest in running the event. Plenty of parents, even those who have completed such a race themselves, aren’t sure what to make of this. If a child shows the interest, discipline, and ability to train for a marathon, is that a good thing? Well, not entirely.
Just because a youngster shows abilities that might make her capable of running a marathon, it’s still not recommended. Children under the age of 18 simply should not run a marathon, says an advisory statement issued by the International Marathon Medical Directors Association. Physical concerns include a great risk of stress fractures and other overuse injuries at the level of training required for a marathon. Shorter strides mean the sheer number of steps youngsters take to train the same distance is far greater than that of adults. In addition, cartilage that is not fully formed is more susceptible to injury. Also, children have less ability to disperse heat from their bodies and therefore are at greater risk of heat stress.
The position paper also points out emotional concerns: “Emotional burnout is a real phenomenon that can have the exact opposite effect of that intended by participation. Children may develop feelings of failure and frustration when the demands, both physical and cognitive, exceed their internal resources.”
Ultimately, even the most goal-oriented children need guidance. Perhaps a child who is precocious enough to consider a marathon is particularly in need of good counsel. Parents would do well to steer such a child toward age-appropriate challenges and encourage her to save the marathon for later.
Expose children to different sports and activities. Now is the time to think broad instead of deep: Try a dance class in the winter, soccer in the spring, swimming in the summer. This will help your daughter develop a range of skills and movements while encouraging overall activity. The added bonus is that she’ll be exposed to a variety of things. Since you can never know what her particular love or talent will be, it’s a gift to encourage a wide range at this age, when chances are greater that she’ll be open to it.
Begin lessons if your child wishes. Let your children participate in organized league sports or lessons if they wish, but don’t force them. If they feel passionate about something, there’s nothing wrong with them developing skills and learning concentration. Most important at this age is that they learn and enjoy, not that they turn into Junior Olympians.
You might have heard that running can stunt a child’s growth. Not true, say experts in youth fitness. “The source of that notion seems to come from dated observations, in which active children were thought to grow at a slower rate than those who were sedentary,” says Oded Bar-Or, M.D., director of the Children’s Exercise and Nutrition Centre and professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “At least one reason for that turned out to be simple: The children who did well in sports and thus were studied were already more mature than those who were less active. They had already gone through their growth spurt, while the sedentary children had their growth spurt yet to come—thus the perception of unequal growth. More recent studies confirm that running and other sports do not stunt growth one bit.”
In fact, recent studies suggest the opposite: that running as a child can translate to better bone health in later life. An American College of Sports Medicine position statement says “ … there is some evidence that exercise-induced gains in bone mass in children are maintained into adulthood, suggesting that physical activity habits during childhood may have long-lasting benefits on bone health.” It goes on to say that activities such as running three days per week or more, 10 to 20 minutes at a time, will augment bone mineral accrual in children and adolescents. That’s significant, since the peak bone mass developed during childhood and early adult years determines risk of osteoporosis later in life.
The process of growth during puberty and adolescence can impact running performance. That’s because, during growth spurts, bones grow at a rate far exceeding that of muscle. The result can be a decline in athletic performance during periods of growth, when the body is literally out of balance. “The anecdotal observation that running performance can suffer during these ‘awkward phases’—when the limbs are lanky and seem to go all over the place—is probably due to a mismatch of growth between the bones, muscles, and tendons,” Dr. Bar-Or explains. “For girls, muscular development catches up to the bones at the very end of a growth spurt. For boys, it can take even longer—up to a year—for the muscular development to catch up.” Although it’s perfectly safe to run during these times, these growth spurts are yet another reason to keep any training light during the preteen and teen years. Young bodies should be expending the lion’s share of their energy on proper growth, not prepping for a marathon.
Find active weekend and holiday pursuits. Your child will be spending more time away at school and with friends. Make good use of family time by planning healthy activities. Hiking and cycling can be combined with camping trips.
Enter a race together. Walk together in a 5-K. Not only is it great exercise, but you’ll be exposing your child to the festivity of a race environment.
Consider organized sports. By now, your child may express an interest in team sports or even in more regimented training for an individual sport such as running. That’s fine, as long as the impetus comes from your child and not from you or a coach. Forcing a program on your child at this stage could turn him or her off of the sport for good.
Combine sports with community work. Encourage your child to walk a race for charity, earning money from sponsors in your neighborhood.
Continue to encourage healthy pastimes. Fight the video habit with active family recreation. Teens enjoy fun activities such as swimming and throwing a Frisbee without even realizing that they’re getting exercise.
Let your child join a sports club or team. A team atmosphere will help to develop cooperation and sportsmanship. At this age, children are old enough to handle greater training structure and competition.
Get a health check for your budding competitive runner. Cardiologists suggest that competitive high school runners be screened before starting more serious training. Congenital heart problems can exist unbeknownst to parents. While the incidence is low and the risk rare, it’s a safe bet to prescreen children before they enter a competitive training situation.
In addition to encouraging your children to be active, there are things you can do to make sure they get off to the right start. Here are some tips to ensure that your own behavior is supportive of physical activity:
Provide positive feedback. Negative criticism can turn your child off to sports altogether. “I would always give her positive feedback when she did well, but also when something went wrong,” Jones says of her daughter’s early forays into sports.
By providing a supportive environment, you’ll be encouraging your child to take chances and learn.
Be aware and involved. Listen to your child. If he or she is feeling pressured, take action by talking to the coach, switching to a league with a different emphasis, trying a new sport, or making sure you’re available to offer support and guidance. Jones stayed involved in her daughter’s training throughout high school, speaking to the coach when she had concerns. She made sure that Jamie understood the importance of proper nutrition and the importance of breaks and recovery for long-term fitness. The result was not just a successful athlete but also a strong, well-adjusted young lady. “She’s learned so much about herself physically and emotionally,” says Jones of her daughter. “She’s more positive about everything as a result of her running.” A bonus was that mother and daughter became exceptionally close because of their shared pastime. “She and I will go and run together in the morning and talk about everything,” Jones says.
Injuries are, unfortunately, a significant risk for girls starting a running program. Research has found that the highest rate of injury among high school sports is in girls’ cross-country. This is partially because untrained girls come off their summer breaks and immediately start logging miles in the fall. The results can be shinsplints and stress fractures.
Girls can avoid injury by following the same smart training principles that apply to any beginning runner: Never increase mileage or speed too quickly, do some running on soft surfaces, and be sure to wear appropriate shoes and insoles. Most important for youngsters is to do some preliminary running over the summer so that they don’t enter the fall program on “cold” legs and abruptly increase their mileage. Running a few miles three or four times a week over the summer might be all it takes to avoid a debilitating injury in the fall.
There is no magic age when your child can or should start focusing exclusively on training for one sport. Most experts, however, recommend that you keep your children involved in a variety of activities for as long as possible. This keeps things fun and prevents boredom. It also helps children develop a variety of skills at an age when they’re most easily able to learn. Runners especially, Dr. Bar-Or points out, can be “born” at any age. Unlike gymnastics and figure skating, which require specific skill development at an early age, running does not need to be mastered early and does not require early specialization for later success.
High school traditionally has been the time when kids make the transition from playing to training. But community and peewee programs are increasingly available for grade-school-age children who wish to engage in competitive running. “Organized groups can be a good way to take running from the fun, family stage to something more goal-oriented,” says Roy Benson, an esteemed coach and heart-rate-training expert in Atlanta who has 4 decades of experience working with runners of all ages and ability levels. He adds, however, that parents should make sure that the program has the right emphasis.
“These programs are good if they teach some of life’s valuable lessons, for example, about the relationship between hard work and rewards. Or if they enhance self-image through accomplishment,” Benson says. “But they can be bad if self-image is damaged because the child does not measure up to somebody else’s definition of success. The worst thing is when children experience this type of unexplained failure and lose their love of running or competition because they are told that they aren’t tough or good enough.”
If your child wishes to concentrate solely on running—or on another sport—follow these guidelines to ensure that she’ll have a positive experience.
Get her involved in numerous athletic events. Most coaches agree that, even if your child shows talent, you shouldn’t focus exclusively on running too early on. Standout runners of all ages have “disappeared” after promising high school or college careers, quitting the sport altogether or never living up to early expectations. The syndrome is referred to as burnout, and it’s all too common in an intense sport such as running. What has happened to these promising youngsters? They have exhausted themselves prematurely—sometimes physically, sometimes mentally, often both.
Make sure that she doesn’t get too serious too soon. “Except for the truly elite talents, most young runners have a window of 4 to 6 years in which they can give it their all,” says Benson. “The elite runners can run just fast enough to win—they don’t have to go into the depths of their psychic wells—and so they can prolong their running careers. But all the others, the kids striving to excel, must give an enormous psychological and physical effort. If a youngster is going to be good at this, he or she has to give up a lot. After giving 100 percent every day, and in every race, and basically giving up being a normal kid or teenager, eventually he or she will need to say, That’s enough. So if you start them at age 10, the career might be over at 16.”
Keep the training light. Benson and other coaches agree that it’s preferable to undertrain a young runner than to overtrain her. After all, the most important aspect of training a high school runner is ensuring that she sticks around for the years to come, whether competitively or recreationally. Keeping training miles light in her early years can prolong a young girl’s career. She will be fresher mentally should she decide to continue competing, and she’ll be less likely to suffer injuries.
Proper mileage will be different for every young girl, but Benson does offer some rough guidelines. In the first few years of high school, rookie runners—even those who demonstrate natural ability—should go very easy on mileage to avoid injury and allow bones, muscles, and tendons to slowly adapt to the repetitive stress of running. Although every girl is different, 15 to 20 miles a week is considered a conservative, low-risk estimate for a runner beginning her high school training. By the junior and senior year, an athlete’s body should have adapted, and she should be comfortable with this level of training. At this point, Benson recommends, girls can move up to 30 or 40 miles a week, as their natural ability allows.
When it comes to hydration and nutrition, children don’t respond just like miniature grown-ups. Although it seems as if kids can keep going and going without tiring, in fact, children are more prone to dehydration and overheating than adults. “When it comes to dissipating heat from the body, children are at a disadvantage,” says Oded Bar-Or, M.D., director of the Children’s Exercise and Nutrition Centre and professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “Children don’t sweat as much as adults; they produce more body heat; and they take in more heat from the environment, since their ratio of surface area to volume is greater than that of an adult.” That triple whammy adds up to a greater risk of rapidly rising body temperature during prolonged exercise such as running.
To protect against such a rise in temperature, make sure your children drink before and after exercise. If they’re active for a long period of time, have them take breaks to drink every 15 minutes or so. This can be tricky, since many children turn up their noses at water. Because they are likely to drink greater amounts of a flavored beverage, a sports drink or diluted juice might be preferable.
For optimal nutrition, don’t feed your children as you would yourself. Your low-fat, heart-healthy diet isn’t appropriate for growing bodies. That doesn’t mean you should let them load up on junk food and unhealthy saturated fats. Instead, include healthy protein- and calcium-rich foods—peanut butter, cheese, milk, meat—in most of their meals without trying to cut fat at every corner. The standard mandate to load up on fresh fruits and veggies still holds; most children take in far too little of these nutrient boosters. Finally, though it may seem impossible, try to limit sweets as much as possible to avoid development of a sweet tooth and its ensuing dental difficulties.
Training, as it turns out, is just one part—and maybe the simplest part—of the equation for coaching youngsters. Developing the mind and building the positive attributes that can come with running should be the priority at this stage. These are the things that a young runner can take with her and apply later in life to anything from work to relationships.
“For grade school and high school athletes, coaching should be more about direction than workouts,” says Ann Boyd, an elite runner who also coaches youths in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “It’s the coach’s job to give young runners the tools, with instruction and mental and emotional support. Proper coaching for young girls is not a matter of yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’”
Parents and children must be on guard for coaches who try to wring every ounce of talent out of a young runner for the sake of the school or for personal gratification. “The best thing a coach can do is pass a runner on as a malleable prospect,” Benson says.
If your son or daughter feels that he or she is not getting proper coaching, talk to the coach or athletic director about your concerns. You don’t have to be an expert on training to know good coaching from bad coaching. If your son or daughter feels put down or pressured or is chronically exhausted or injured, the coach needs a talking-to. If the coach disagrees or fails to change his or her slant, you might want to get your child involved in a different running program, say, on a community or club level. “It’s a matter of protecting your daughter,” says Jones, who stayed very involved in her daughter’s coaching. “Her enjoyment and health are at stake.”
Eating disorders and body image issues can plague girls well before their teens. “Kids are talking about being fat when they’re 5 and 6 and 7 years old now,” says Nada Stotland, M.D., a psychiatrist who specializes in women and eating disorders. A recent American Academy of Pediatrics position paper confirms that “a dramatic number of very young girls are presenting with an obsessive concern about health and fitness, severe food restriction, significant weight loss, and even arrest of growth and development.”
But it goes on to say that early detection can make a significant difference in recovery: “There is strong evidence that the longer the duration of illness, the harder it is to achieve recovery.” Parents should be diligent in looking for warning signs and shouldn’t be afraid to get help at their first suspicion of a body image issue.
“Look for warning signs such as refusal to eat food, or hiding how much they’re eating,” Stotland says. Other warning signs include “Saying ‘I’ll eat in my room,’ or ‘I’ll eat somewhere else.’”
Whether athletics exacerbates or improves body image and eating issues is unclear, and it probably varies highly from case to case. While some research suggests that eating disorders are more prevalent among athletic girls than among nonathletes, no causal relationship has been proven. Meanwhile, another broad study of athletes actually found a lower incidence of eating problems among non-elite high school athletes and lower levels of body dissatisfaction among athletes overall than in the general population.
In other words, there’s no evidence that sports themselves result in a greater risk of disordered eating. Rather, many experts believe that girls with certain body types or personality types are more likely to become athletes and that these girls already were more at risk for eating disorders.
You can contribute to your daughter’s healthy attitude about food and her body by doing the following:
Set a good example. Eat healthfully yourself, and don’t express extreme dissatisfaction with your own body.
Stay away from inappropriate comments about weight. Don’t criticize her weight or give her ultimatums to lose weight. Negative remarks about weight at a young age can have a devastating effect on a girl.
Ensure that she knows about proper nutrition. If your young runner is concerned with her performance, you can have a big influence by impressing upon her the long-term training benefits of proper nutrition.
Limit exposure to television. Research has actually demonstrated a causal relationship between television and increased eating disorder symptoms in grade school children.
Jones recognized the importance of providing a positive influence when her daughter was running as a youngster. “I was always very concerned about eating issues,” she says. “Other girls on the team would come to the house, and you could see that they had a problem. I tried to communicate the fact that what you eat isn’t important just for running, but for overall health.”
If your daughter exhibits signs of an eating disorder, seek professional help. For more on eating disorders, see chapter 15.
My daughter was born to run. At least that’s what everyone tells me. Her father is a five-time world record holder. A two-time Olympian. My running world was nothing like that, but I guess I was better than average.
So when folks see Bianca, all skinny arms and legs, light on her little feet, people inevitably ask: “So, is she running yet?”
Um, no.
Bianca is 6. She loves gymnastics, likes dancing, rides her bike around the neighborhood and runs when she plays in the park. When the local races hold kids’ fun runs, sometimes she joins in. More often she doesn’t, saying she doesn’t want to. I’m not about to force her.
I had a parent who decided that I was going to be a runner. I wasn’t given much say in the matter, and I was racing before I entered junior high school. After some rather miserable years in high school when I didn’t even want to compete but was forced to, I stopped running altogether. Luckily I overcame my dad’s influence and found my way back to the sport as an adult.
Did my dad introduce me to the sport that’s defined my life? Sure. Could it have been a more enjoyable path, one that wasn’t so fraught with anxiety? Yes again.
My goal for my daughter is to expose her to the idea of running. We’ll have silly little races in the park. She sees her father and me run on most days. She goes to the races and cheers on her friends’ moms.
If the day comes when she decides to run, she’ll know it’s an option. Maybe she’ll be good at it; maybe she’ll even be great. Mostly, I hope she finds something that keeps her fit and happy as she develops into adulthood. Meanwhile, I’ll happily keep buying leotards.