If you are just like me, you imagine that your kid is going to be a superstar. The truth is there aren’t many superstars. I dont think I was born with much atheletic talent, but I have high hopes for my boy. The day I passed by the toddler basketball hoop and nerf footballs, his future glory flashes before my eyes. That is, until we get home and i toss him the ball and it hits him square in the face not once, but 6,000 times. He didn’t get any better. Over and over again same results My dreams were getting fuzzier and disappearing quickly. I mean, he just learned to walk a few months ago he should be able to stop a ball from hitting him in the nose right? Wrong. They dont have the hand-eye coordination or reaction time. This is completely normal. Not to mention my boy is just so excited to have a new toy that he can play with and Dad wants to play too. What do you do? Some people just wait until they get older and develop the skills needed on their own. Plus, teaching a terrible 2 year old, or in my case a terrible 20 month old, anything can be quite challenging on its own. Here is what I do to train my boy to catch by slowly and methodically using repetition to help build the neuropathways needed for catching a ball. I started by changing the object that I want him to catch. Something with a lot more “hang time” than a football or bouncy ball. I chose for the first time, a T-shirt tied in a Knot. I could immediately see the results. When he didnt catch it it landed on him and draped over his face or shoulder. Great ! No permanent damage from being bombed in the nose! The T-shirt worked great. I keep one next to desk. Its a slow process. The next tool I use to teach my boy to play catch is balloons. they are cheap and fun. I even like bouncing them up in the air and not sharing from time to time. Balloons may be the superior game for him in terms of catching, we started with a larger fully inflated balloon and gradually inflated them less until the circumferance is reduced I figured this would increase the difficulty for him and sharpen his skills. The down side to balloons is, just like Dad, he gets side tracked and the excitement of balloons can over ride the attention span for the game of catch whereas a t-shirt tied in a knot is not very exciting.
