I opted for the Oct. 6 edition of Sports Illustrated. I subscribe, so I have the issue at home. But there was a tease on the cover for a story I'd been meaning to read: "The American Athlete Age 10 - Time of Their Lives or Too Much, Too Soon"

I remember seeing the article when I was leafing through my copy at home. My son, Max, was about to turn 10, so I had been meaning to read it. But the story and sidebars run for 17 pages in the magazine, so reading it had become one of those things I was going to do "when I had the time."

But like most things on that list, reading a 17-page Sports Illustrated article kept falling further and further below mowing the lawn, folding laundry and trying to keep the children from strangling each other. But in the peace of the doctor's waiting room, I managed to get to it. Once I started, I couldn't put the magazine down.

If you have children, boys or girls, between the ages of 8 and 12, you need to find a copy of this article and read it. It details a lot of the things we're doing right by our children and some of the things we're doing wrong.

It speaks to how 10 years old is the age when children are like sponges. They can absorb information like they couldn't only a year or two before. But the hormones and moodiness of adolescence haven't kicked in yet.

According to the article, 10-year-olds love "to be praised; to be asked their opinion and tell what they know; to belong, be it to clubs or teams or other groups; and to hear true stories, not just made-up ones."

To use a pseudo-word that's become commonplace in sports, they're coachable.

"Sports offer many of the things that 10-year-olds crave. Teams are clubs; victories and defeats are real, not made up; and the rules are presumably applied evenly," the writer, Alexander Wolff, continues.

The article was especially interesting to me. Max is everything Wolff describes. He loves sports -- the camaraderie and the competition, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. He loves to talk about them as much as he loves playing them.

It's the thing we have most in common. When I was his age, I was playing basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring and football in the fall. When I wasn't playing for an organized team, there were pick-up games in the park.

That interest didn't wane as I got older. It ballooned. I went from playing sports to reading about them to eventually writing about them. I was the sports editor of the newspapers in high school and college. And my first jobs out of college were as sports writers.

Max seems to share those passions. It seems fitting that he was born during the Game 4 of the 1993 World Series. The Blue Jays beat the Phillies 15-14 in the highest scoring game in World Series history. My favorite photograph of myself shows Max and I watching the end of the game in the hospital room when he was half an hour old.

I've tried not to push Max into sports. My parents didn't push me, I found them on my own. But the temptation is often overwhelming. Since his first season of T-ball at 5, I've been an assistant coach on each of Max's teams. I often wonder if that's a good thing. I want to be involved, but I also want those teams to be his, not mine.

The Sports Illustrated article chronicles not only what's right with the American athlete at age 10, but what we're often doing wrong. Wolff describes the pressure that's already being put on kids to specialize. While I played basketball, football and baseball, kids today, especially the most gifted athletes, are often asked to play one sport year round. Basketball-football-baseball has become basketball-basketball-basketball or soccer-soccer-soccer.

Wolff points out that many experts say there's no need for a child to choose a sport to the exclusion of others that early. In junior high, Michael Jordan was a better football and baseball player than a basketball player. Kids don't all mature at the same rate and, at 10, it's impossible to tell which ones are going to be the best players and at which sports.

Asking a pre-teen to play nothing but baseball or soccer year round is doing him or her a disservice. They may not find the sport they're going to have a real talent or passion for. Just because a soccer player is faster than her peers and scores four goals per game at 10, doesn't mean mean she should never dribble a basketball.

The article contains a sidebar about a 10-year-old from Alabama who played in 127 baseball games in 2001, 90 of them with a team based a two-hour, 45-minute drive from his house. Don't think he's going to burn out on baseball, I have two words for you: Todd Marinovich. If you don't know who he is (or was), look it up.

I've been guilty of some of that myself. Max is not big to begin with. And because he started kindergarten in California as a four-year-old, he's a fifth-grader who only turned 10 a month ago. Many of his classmates are a full year older and a foot taller. He's made it through the third- and fourth-grade seasons without scoring a point.

He gets frustrated, but always plays hard. This year before the sign-ups, I asked if he was sure he wanted to play. Maybe he should just concentrate on baseball, I said. Thankfully, Max said no. He wanted to play basketball again.

He still may become a good basketball player. Even if he doesn't, Max is a very good teammate. He's giving as much as he's getting from sports.

Max played only one year of soccer and never really took to it. But he's been playing baseball, which is played as much with your head as with your body, since kindergarten. This year, for the first time, he played fall baseball. He had a great time, but that's as specialized as he's going to get for a while.

His sister, Madison, is seven. So far, she's shown very little interest in team sports. She likes gymnastics and is a good swimmer for her age. But the best thing I can do is expose her to many things and let her find her own passion. And she will. It may not be sports. It may be the violin, the stage, computers or even, God forbid, cheerleading. Soon, we'll start to find out.

Like I said, if you have a child at or around 10 years of age, you need to read that article. As far as I can tell, it's no longer available online. So you'll have to track down the back issue. You can always look at your doctor's office.