Sports offers many of the things 10-year-olds crave. Teams are clubs; victories and defeats are real, not made-up; and rules are presumably applied evenly. "Ten-year-olds are collectors and organizers," says Bob Ditter, a family therapist who practices in the Boston area. "That's why baseball, which is very methodical and specific, and basketball, where there are plays, appeal to them. There's an elegance to sports that makes sense to a 10-year-old.".
There's a usefulness to them too. With the 10-year-olds' impending physical maturation, sports will soon separate them, sometimes very quickly, according to size and skill level. And as they prepare to move from the romantic "having fun" stage to the technical "getting better" stage, kids can be quite aware of the .
implications, for by the end of the fourth grade they've become strikingly more realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. .
"They know for sure who is really good at math and can feel that they're not going to magically get better at it," says Michael Thompson, a child psychologist and co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. "Indeed, if you wanted to have a class of fourth-graders nominate their future valedictorian, they could do it with considerable accuracy. That ability to be realistic is a huge step forward. The sad part is that they lose the capacity to engage in magical thinking, to believe that they'll suddenly get much better at something at which they're not in fact very good.".
So it is that children at 10 also reach a sporting crossroads -- and as any student of the blues will tell you, crossroads can be fraught with complications. Whereas eight-and nine-year-olds are conformists and cultivators of wide-ranging interests, at 10 kids might delve deeply into their passions but have fewer of them. It's the age at which a child is likely to either set sports aside or choose to throw himself into them -- or into one sport.