Are you a parent who wants to push your little one to be an Olympic champion, but you're just not sure which sport to push him/her into? Then the Colorado-based company Atlas Sports Genetics has an offer for you: Spend $149, have a swab taken from the inside of your child's cheek, have the DNA sent to a lab in Australia, and have a scientist analyze the ACTN3 gene, which is linked to athletic performance.Kevin Reilly, the President of Atlas Sports Genetics, cautions that you can't read too much into a DNA test; "Based on the test of a 5-year-old or a newborn, you are not going to see if you have the next Michael Johnson," he told the New York Times.
But he also added this:
"if you wait until high school or college to find out if you have a good athlete on your hands, by then it will be too late. We need to identify these kids from 1 and up, so we can give the parents some guidelines on where to go from there."Of course, those parents could just let their kids go out and play and discover for themselves what they're good at. But not every parent thinks that way. The company started selling the DNA test kits on Monday, and about 60 families have placed orders.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-02-2008 @ 7:09PM
Kathy Seal said...
What will they think of next? When it comes to extracting money from worried parents, there’s no shortage of business models. Now the so-called “sports gene” test for only $149 is finding a market for one reason only: because we parents are under so much pressure these days to make sure our kids succeed. That’s because kids are facing competition everywhere they turn — in school, in sports, in music, you name it. One girl I know even had to compete to get into her school’s community service program!
All this hyper-competition makes us parents feel like our kids must be “the best” if they’re going to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. Our evolutionary hardwiring — which arose when it was essential for parents to push their kids to compete for food and to stay away from predators — reacts to the competition in our children’s world by turning on our “fight or flight” anxiety. It makes us feel that we have to do whatever we can to help our kids compete and win.
Enter the entrepreneurs willing to “help” us do that! Enter our criticism of parents for taking that bait. And yet. Let’s tease out exactly why we criticize them. Because isn’t it perfectly understandable that we want our kids to achieve? Sure. But the problem is that schemes like genetic testing put pressure on the kids to excel. And such pressure backfires. What makes children excel in sports is their love of the game — which comes from the fun of playing, the feelings of camaraderie, the pride from acquiring new skills. Their passion motivates them to practice and eventually excel. But pressure from without — from anyone, for example, expecting them to live up to the ‘promise’ of a so-called ’sports gene’ — is a good way to kill that passion.
Kathy Seal
Coauthor, Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids: Dealing with Competition to Raise a Successful Child
www.kathyseal.net
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