I stand corrected

Coach May, sometimes they make us look...ahh a little dumb. Your son sounds like mine except mine went public and laid the blame on me. There was this newspaper article last year about his curveball. From the article:
"I learned it from my dad when I was about 11 years old and have just been throwing it ever since," Bell said.
Granted, I might have shown him how to throw a curve when he was eleven, but I told him not to throw it.
Fungo

Fungo that is hilarious. That story reminds me of something that happened a couple of weeks ago. I was doing some posistion work with the catchers and corner players. We were working on the blocked third strike and the first baseman posting inside or outside depending on where the ball was blocked and recovered. I told the catchers "If you block inside the first baseman is going to post inside. Thats where we want the throw inside. Now if the runner runs way inside trying to take your throwing angle away and hes out of the running box dont try to throw it over his head. Make the throw inside and if it drills him in the back and hes out of the box hes out. But dont try to miss him and sail it into rf. Well we put runners at the plate throw a simulated third strike pitch in the dirt and the runner takes off for first. The runner runs way inside, first posts inside because the ball is blocked inside. Jeff comes up and throws a seed right into the back of our player. Kid goes down in a heap. Jeff turns around and says "You told me to drill him".

My son surprised me with something different. He will be 12 in 3 weeks. He knows that I frown upon young players throwing curve balls and has heard it from me from the beginning.

I saw a post on a site (perhaps here) about players throwing curves anyway so you might as well teach them the proper form). That got me thinking and I took him aside and told him I wanted to teach him the proper way to throw a curve.

He looked straight at me like a doctor about to tell a cancer patient that they have 1 week to live and said....

Dad, You know I am too young to throw a curve ball. Maybe in a couple years we can do this.

He floored me.... My god, he really does listen to me sometimes

I think I saw another reason to not throw them in youth ball. It seemed to confound the throwing motion for fastballs. IOWs...Kids that tried to mix up their pitches seemed to get their mechanics mixed up. What started as a fastball for my son turned into a cut fastball with the fingers beside the ball instead of behind the ball. The stress from throwing a fastball with poor mechanics was worse than the CB IMO.

At hand break he would not pronate his hands properly and it became a bad habit.

Moral...you better watch mechanics closely and know what good mechanics look like ( I did not) CB or not

When do you start throwing a curve ball? They limit the number of innings a kid pitches by rule. Why? IMO to keep tabs on coaches. There seems to be this discussion about the curve ball. Well like everything else in youth sports when there is concern about safety etc etc they make a rule. So a kid can only pitch so many innings a week why not have somebody limit the number of curve balls allowed in an inning or an at bat or ban the curve ball altogether until a certain age. Sarcasm I know but the way things progress in this day and age you never know.