Being Bad (at Sports) Can Be Good

So you can pay $149 to be told whether your child has a gene that may or may not be linked with athletic ability. That is the news on yesterday’s front page, where Juliet Macur wrote about a newly released product from Atlas Sports Genetics, which allows parents learn whether their child carries the version of a gene, called ACTN3, that makes for physical power or the version that makes for endurance.

I will leave it to others to debate what this means for the future of sports. And let’s ignore for the purposes of this conversation the fact that the test really doesn’t predict anything with real certainty.

But let’s say that you really could gauge, with a swab inside the mouth, your child’s chances of dominating at track and being just mediocre at football. And let’s focus on what the possibility of such a test means for parenting.

What I fear it would become is one more way for parents to insure that their children never learn to fail. In her latest book, “Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness,” the psychologist Tamar Chansky argues that this is one of the most fundamental jobs of a parent, and one we don’t tend to do very well. (Her book even includes scripts for how to walk a child through failure for those of us who need the guidance.)

If you never fail, she writes, you never learn that you can pick yourself back up again. And that’s a lesson best learned young, while your center of gravity is low and it doesn’t hurt as much to fall down.

Yesterday’s article opens with a quote from the mother of a 2 year old, who is watching her toddler struggle through a soccer lesson and who thinks a genetic test for sports aptitude would be a grand idea.

“I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it’s good to match them with the right activity,” the mother said. “I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration.”

But isn’t that very frustration, particularly for the child, the point of sports — the point of growing up — in the first place?

I was an ice skater as a kid. Years of 5 a.m. patch sessions taught me I wasn’t a very good ice skater. It also taught me that ice skating could be fun and that I could move on.

My boys, in turn, have cycled through soccer, karate, wrestling, baseball, swimming, football, fencing, snowboarding and a few others I have probably forgotten. Along the way they found they love tennis and golf.

If a test had clued me into that fact at birth, they might have gotten an earlier start and been more competitive for it. But they might also have been cheated of half the journey, the part where they learn what they aren’t great at, what they have to worker harder at than others — and where they also learn that that’s just fine.