A couple of examples:
If you don't start playing soccer really young, you will never be able to catch up to someone who did.
A child can easily become fluent in two languages if they're immersed from a young age. Learning a second language once you're past 20 is hard.
It would be shame to waste potential.
And if your child hates soccer? Their ability will only really matter if they want to turn it into a career.
> A child can easily become fluent in two languages if they're immersed from a young age.
Which, if not used, is lost to the years. My mother could speak Serbian when she was young, because she was exposed to it. She can't anymore; hasn't been able to for years. I learned German when I was young, but don't recall a single thing now. Again, unless you want to live in a country where that language is prevalent, the long term value is rather low.
> It would be shame to waste potential.
IMO, it would be a greater shame to shape the child in your image for them, instead of into the person they want to become.
In my experience, social skills, a good sense of self, and a broad educational background have served me better in adulthood than my years spent swimming ever did. If anything, my parents focus on me being a swimmer (which provided a social venue for them) held me back from developing more skills I could have used once I became an adult.
Oh, the humanity. They would then grow on to be adults who can't play soccer well, and that's like a career suicide. /s
Young kids also have another immense advantage that they'll quickly lose: being kids. Burdening with tons of BS activities and responsibilities will steal time from their childhood and playing, and wont even let them discover the activities and things they do like for themselves.
Why would they need to catch up to anyone? I'd rather have my child love the game or hobby than cram every waking moment into some activity. The ability to hear yourself think and actively listen to others is more important imho. There is so much noise in US culture telling kids who they should measure up to. As a parent I feel I need to be the counter balance to those messages.
There are also plenty of examples of professional sports players who started in their teens. "Google <sports league> late start."
Sometimes a game isn't fun when you're matched with and against people far above your skill level. You feel like you bring the whole team down, and you feel like you cannot win no matter how much training and effort you put in.
be it playing soccer in high school or videogames like overwatch...
Anyway, the flip side is someone whose always team captain, runs circles around everyone, and goes on to uni to find out they're just okay when they're competing against 10X more people.
Of course not every kid wants or needs to be a pro violin player. But if you don't make them give it a serious try in the first place , you'll never know if they'd want to be one or not.
I went to a school that had two hours of compulsory sport five days a week.
The end result of this was that it taught me to loathe and avoid sport, exercise and most forms of competition, which has resulted in health and social issues I've been having to cope with for the rest of my life.
My little daughter does not study Spanish or Japanese, but she keeps learning interesting bits of these, just because it's fun to know. She'll have easier time studying should she decide to.
I don't buy this, at least in terms of kids "learn faster".
Adults have the benefit of both motivation and 20 (or more) years of communication experience, same as how a senior programmer with 20 years under their belt wouldn't find it hard to add another ML-dialect to their tool-belt vs a high-school grad who is learning their first functional language. If anything is "hard" about learning a language as an adult it's the time and priority shift required for immersion.
Now soccer, yea I'll give you that one. Or Piano, or whatever other skill where the compound benefit of repeated fine-motor skill practice often pays off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition#Ag...
Researchers fight over the age of the transition (roughly 12) and how sharp it is (~3 years), but the effect is undeniably large.
Yes, I am disputing it. So?
Sorry, but I don't like the "research spoken, everybody shut up" tone.
Especially since research is not that conclusive at all. From the very lemma you've posted: "This strict version has since been rejected for second-language acquisition, as some adult learners have been observed who reach native-like levels of pronunciation and general fluency. However, in general, adult learners of a second-language rarely achieve the native-like fluency that children display, despite often progressing faster in the initial stages. This has led to speculation that age is indirectly related to other, more central factors that affect language learning."
Or, from another lemma:
B. Harley (1986)[24] compared attainment of French learners in early and late immersion programs. She reports that after 1000 exposure hours, late learners had better control of French verb systems and syntax. However, comparing early immersion students (average age 6.917 years) with age-matched native speakers identified common problem areas, including third person plurals and polite ‘vous’ forms. This suggests grammar (in L1 or L2) is generally acquired later, possibly because it requires abstract cognition and reasoning.
Also showing different strengths in different areas of learning between kids and adults:
They found that native-English speakers who learned German as adults were disadvantaged on certain grammatical tasks but performed at near-native levels on lexical tasks. These findings are consistent with work by Hahne (2001, cited in Scherag et al., 2004).
Likewise for cherry picking studies out of a large body of literature.
> This strict version has since been rejected for second-language acquisition, as some adult learners have been observed who reach native-like levels of pronunciation and general fluency.
Huh? This doesn't make the research any less conclusive, or support the GP's point. It's like saying the existence of players like Muggsy Bogues makes the thesis "height is extremely important for profession baseketball" less conclusive.
Data are next to useless without proper interpretation of what they mean.
And even before that, we must assume that the data are correctly collected and relevant.
And something like 80% of research papers have been found in meta-studies to be non reproducible, to the extend that scientists speak of a "reproducibility crisis".
So, unless we're talking about hard core sciences, like physics and the like, where things are testable with actual experimental apparatus and hard numbers (and even there, I wouldn't go into speculative stuff like String theory), I'd take any society/psychology/physiology related study with lots of grains of salt.
Up until the 80s it was "scientific fact" that being gay was a abnormal mental condition -- supported by scientific papers and literature.
Or take the dietary (the official scientific dietary advice) over various decades, and how it made a u-turn regarding fat, etc.
Computer Scientists that are driven to science should not take into much account pseudo-sciences and half-sciences which much of cognitive studies, psychology, sociology etc are.
That adults can learn languages more quickly is a different question than that of critical periods.
Adults don't have that critical period to lean on, but there are efficient ways to learn languages for people who have long been outside of that critical period that can allow adults, with their own cognitive strengths, to quickly master a language to a given level of fluency at a quicker pace than children.
There are entire online communities of polyglots that regularly practice these techniques and many of them didn't learn their first second language until well into adulthood.