I choose to think of my kid first and foremost as a KID, secondly as a baseball player. Silly me!
Not really sure what this comment is supposed to mean when it comes to this issue. Are you suggesting that people who worry about overuse injuries in kids are seeing their kids primarily as baseball players rather than as kids. If so, I don't really follow your logic. Actually, it seems to me the other way around. Putting limits on a kid, for the kid's own sake, especially when the kid is brimming with enthusiasm, but lacks mature judgment and experience, is what you do when you see the kid as a kid first and foremost.
To recap, Al Pal stated that "we didn't allow our LHP son to play year round ball until sophomore yr in HS" ...the key word being PLAY. We can ALL go overboard with protecting arms in case the kid can make it to the next level or we can use common sense, try to go by pitch smart guidelines, and let the kids be kids. I will not stop my son from being on a baseball team at age 11/12/13 year round with his buddies because he loves the game.
My son pitches, but he doesn't want to ever be a PO. He has played on a year long travel team from age 9 to his current almost 13, once again the team is together for a year, but they do not play all year, and not to tempt fate here but he has not had any medical issues. If and when he does, because I do acknowledge that all athletes get hurt at some point, I will evaluate then where to go from there. Until then, he is a KID first who loves to PLAY baseball, and I will not say "You can't be on a year round team because there is the possibility of you hurting your arm."
I want to let my kid be a KID first and a ball player second. My number one priority is to keep him healthy because he is my child, not keep his arm healthy because he is a pitcher.
I don't really have any idea what you mean by "going overboard with protecting arms."
You say you'll worry about injury when and if the injury happens. But the thing is that some injury may well be happening to your son in slow burn already. That's because some injuries are the result of cumulative overuse that may seem no biggie along the way. The kid feels fine all along the way, right up until the point that he doesn't. THen something snaps and the kid is never quite the same again. When it finally happens, he may think it was something he did in the moment that caused the injury, that it was just bad luck or a bad day or something -- when in reality he's been in the process of injuring himself for years and years. So I don't think one can really judge on the basis of how a kid feels at each given moment whether he's injuring himself or not. It's like when I had a bad back problem, apparently out of the blue, with no particular traumatic event occurring. I told my doctor, "I didn't do anything. It just started hurting out of the blue." She said, "you've been doing it for 20 years, and just haven't noticed until now."
Plus, you know, it's not just a matter of "protecting arms in case the kid make it to the next level." It's a matter of protecting young arms period -- even if the kid lacks the talent and drive to ever "make it to the next level" you STILL don't want to abuse the kid's arm. Those injuries that we suffer in youth have a way of having lingering effects far beyond youth.
As I said above, kids lack judgment, wisdom and experience. They want to please their coaches, their teammates and, yes, their parents. Isn't the job of a parent to do that on the kid's behalf? I would think that part of what "letting a kid be a kid" amounts to is not asking them to make adult decisions, but also not side-stepping our responsibility as adults to make such decisions on their behalf.