The benefits of playing sports as children
Playing sports, you know, is always good for you: with the due distinctions, in fact, there is no age in which it cannot be practiced. Including the early years of childhood, when, rather than real sport, we should talk about recreational-motor activities or movement games, aimed at promoting adequate skeletal muscle development in the child and, at the same time, involving him and keeping him entertained : it is in fact essential that sporting activity is chosen and structured from this point of view, that is, as a playful moment in which the child participates because it gives him pleasure. This for several reasons: because a positive experience will allow him to grow in a balanced way; because it will make him want to continue practicing that and other disciplines; because, where the sense of freedom and play prevail, premature and harmful competition anxieties are much less likely to appear. It is in fact only the athlete (adolescent and adult) who trains for the result; the child, on the contrary, does exercise and sports only for pure pleasure.
When to start and which sports for children?
The unanimous advice of the experts is to accompany and support (but never force) the child's movement from the first months of life, and to subsequently encourage him to experiment with the first motor games, so that the little one naturally acquires an active lifestyle. In addition to home exercise games (but also in the garden and on the playground, which in the warm season is a place to be frequented often, for leisure and socialization purposes), all those activities that we could define as pre-sports are welcome, i.e. playful and unstructured approach to sport. In general, they aim to promote movement and proprioception, i.e. the ability to perceive and recognize the position of one's body in space, and are always carried out by children together with their parents.
Sports from three months to three years
An excellent option, adopted with enthusiasm by many families, is made up of water courses: parents and children from three months to three years dive together following the instructions of the instructor, for a gentle approach to water, an element by definition natural for newborns, who pleasantly relive the experience of wallowing in their mother's tummy. The aquatics courses, whose objectives are relaxation and harmonic motor development, continue even beyond the age of three, but from this moment the children enter the pool alone with the instructor. Same age group zero-three for the psychomotricity courses, an activity that pursues objectives inherent in the development of coordination and sense of balance: the exercises are performed in pairs, child-parent, under the guidance of the psychomotrician, in a furnished room with colored mattresses, a large wall mirror, for the child to observe himself as he moves, and numerous tools (all compliant with the law and safe for the little ones), such as rubber balls, solids to be stacked, oblique planes for gymnastic paths based on specific motor development programs. Psychomotricity courses are also an opportunity for mums and dads to meet and discuss, especially in the first, and most complicated, months after the birth of their child. Other valid solutions, but from two to three years old, are the baby gym and pre-dance: on the one hand, meetings in which the child, through games and exercises, develops motor skills such as running, jumping, somersaulting, throwing an object and catch it on the fly; on the other hand, workshops of body expression, which include music, to begin distinguishing sounds and rhythms, and the execution of movements (guided and free) that promote self-perception in space.
Children and sport: the advantages 
As we have seen, doing physical activity and sport allows children to play, move, run, release energy and, at the same time, improve the development of the bone, muscular and circulatory systems, prevent many diseases, regulate the metabolism and reduce the risk of overweight and obesity. Furthermore, sport favors the acquisition of a vast range of psychomotor skills: coordination, balance, orientation and conditional skills (ie those that need to be trained), such as strength, endurance and speed. From a psychic point of view, then, physical activity reduces stress, anxiety and the feeling of loneliness, facilitates socialization and, as soon as the child is a little older, teaches some fundamental values, such as respect, solidarity, loyalty, trust, perseverance and the ability to face problems. Finally, studies have shown that regular physical activity improves future learning (e.g. maths) and eventually even academic performance
Taken from Born Mom | by Matthias Lerner
