Some of the kids didn't even know what a goal was. It was very hard to resist. To his mind, the big problem with raising children this way is that almost nothing they accomplish feels good enough for them. There's always another sport to master, another feather to add to the cap. That means the children are sometimes left without a base of values.
Most people rush and rush and rush without asking the important questions.
Dr. Rosenfeld considers this primarily a phenomenon affecting modern parents. A study comes out saying that breast-feeding raises a kid's intelligence level, and it becomes gospel. Listening to music makes a kid good at math, so every kid has to have a Mozart CD played to it in the womb. Don't do it, and you risk stealing something from the child, the thinking goes. The problem is that much of the research is poor, Dr. Rosenfeld said.