My honest advice is to say no. If I could go back and do it over, I would have turned down the invitation to the team track at age 5. I am not kidding.
I concur.
I’ve actually had this conversation in person with two people whose children where around 4/5 and they were considering team track. One of them was my DDs occupational therapist, so she was seeing the physical impact in front of her.
If I could go back in time, I would have forced her to stick out more sports in the hope of finding something less… overall damaging. I declined her team invite at 5 and took her to pre team at another gym because I didn’t think a 5 year old should have the pressure of needing to be perfect.
And it is always about chasing a perfection that doesn’t exist. Anything your kid does well, they could be doing it better. If they do it REALLY well, time to add on the next building block. There is just a constant pressure to keep doing bigger and bigger things.
Yes, most high level competitive sports take up a ton of time and a ton of money, but not many sports have 7 year olds doing more hours than a part time job.
I’m always at the gym with my daughter, I work the front desk there during the hours she’s there most days a week - we live too far away for me to leave and she has a medical condition where if she got hurt, I really need to be there immediately. We literally never see my husband. If we had other kids, this wouldn’t be doable at all.
I keep a list of orthopedists that treat different body parts and understand gymnastics handy, because we need to see them all the damn time. Her 11 year old friend has 3 back fractures (in level 4 so she was not high level) and has spent the last 16 months in a back brace. She’s just been cleared to start handstands and slowly bending over to reach her toes.
But… my daughter loves it. She’s a perfectionist and likes rules and order, so this gives her everything she wants. She likes to take risks and she’s rewarded by getting to do bigger skills. She’s happy to spend hours and hours in the gym and wishes I would just home school her so she could be there even more. She’s never loved anything more and her excitement yesterday about doing multiple giants into dismount by herself melted my bad day away. She loves her coaches and this gym is her safe space.
I could never take it away now - but I wish I had tried even harder to find her something else she loves when I had the chance.