" To constantly maintain an action within a certain time, they need to have a great deal of patience and perseverance. At the beginning of training, most of the children fail to hold the required posture and become frustrated; some of them even hurt their bodies and weep wronged tears. But after a period of training, ultimately, they overcome their deficiencies and achieve the required standard. Thus during training, young athletes become more self-confident and more tenacious. .
However, critics of this view argue that to build up children's self-confidence and help them become more tenacious, there are many ways besides pushing children into intense exercise training. Premature sports training not only could harm children's psychological development but also could have a negative effect on mental development. .
Lingling Ding, a professor at Nanjing Institute of Physical Education, reports that "Seventy percent of children began to accept the training due to parents' wishes, twenty percent was directly elected by coaches, and only ten percent of children liked the sports in which they are training and was selected for their hard-training " (27). In this report, we can see that most of the child athletes do not desire to participate in the exercise training. Imagine a four to five year-old child who is at his/her happiest age when he/she should have enjoy playing with friends, but he/she prematurely is forced into too much training. Training takes up most of child's everyday life and carries a lot of pressure brought by competitions, which should not happen at that young age. These children would lose their happy childhood and could even have a strongly rebellious attitude later. So premature exercise training would not be conducive to children's psychological health.
Coaches who think that competitive sports training should start from early childhood argue that children can perform actions easier due to the fact that their bodies are more flexible.