Your health: How to help your kids pick a sport

How to help your child pick a sport

Helping your child find the best sport(s) that fit his or her interests and abilities can be an overwhelming and daunting task.

Dr. Chris Stankovich at ThisWeekSports.com offers some tips to parents:

• Provide multiple experiences. Keep an eye out for different sports and leagues offered in your community and talk to your child to gauge his or her interest. The good news is that most youth sport opportunities for small kids don't last very long, meaning that even if your child dislikes the sport it will be over before you know it.

• Learn about your child's preferences and abilities. While watching your child compete, take note of characteristics that might help you decide on what sports best match your child. For example, if your child is aggressive, football or wrestling might be a good fit. Similarly, a more reserved, calculating child might enjoy bowling or golf. And if your child has a motor that never stops, perhaps soccer, cross country, or basketball are sports to consider.

• Discuss your child's experiences. Check in with your child regularly to see what he or she says about the sports you try. As you go through this process, try to discern what qualities are going to be constant (i.e. soccer will always involve running), and what things will change (i.e. if your child doesn't like the current coach chances are there will be a new coach next year).

• Support your child. Offer positive reinforcement, cheer, and talk about your child's success on the field. From those exchanges try to evaluate his or her interest in the sport, and level of motivation to play the sport again in the future.

• Allow for change. Love your child unconditionally, meaning accept his or her views on a sport even if they are different from yours. Help your child finish out the season if at all possible, and discuss options of other sports to try.

• Don't specialize too soon, and create breaks throughout the year. Two big trends that have developed over the past decade are specializing in one sport, and playing sports year-round. Until your child has played many different sports, I would not advise even considering specializing, and if you fail to create regular breaks from sports it can lead to greater risk for injuries and sports burnout.

Brain scanner tells if you have concussion

Concussions can be tough to diagnose. Figuring out whether a knock to the head significantly harmed a person's brain usually requires a trip to the hospital and a potentially expensive MRI or CT scan.

BrainScope, a Maryland-based biotech firm is working on a much easier way to do it: a wearable device that uses electrodes to measure electronic activity inside your brain and transmit readings to a re-configured Android smartphone, The Washington Post reports.

The company recently received clearance from the federal Food & Drug Administration to market the device.

The company wants to sell the scanner to hospitals and emergency rooms in the U.S. first, but chief executive Michael Singer says the product could one day expand to places like China and India where fewer hospitals have MRI machines.

“Wherever you hit your head is where we're going to want to find the market,” he said.

The 35-person company already has two devices approved by regulators, but its most recent brain scanner will be the first one sold commercially. The Ahead 100, approved in 2014, was an almost identical device that relied on one particular test, which some physicians saw as insufficient to diagnose a condition that takes a lot of different forms. A second iteration of the product let the device transmit data to a smartphone.