Take Junior out to the ballgame.

A new study appearing in the July issue of Health Psychology tells us that parents who value tough team sports tend to raise more active kids.

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Duke University studied a sample of 681 parents of 433 fourth- and fifth-graders from 12 schools in Houston. They found that those parents who conveyed the importance of high-intensity team sports to their children had more active children. Both the boys and girls watched less TV and spent less time on their computers.

This is great, but I'd like to add that there's a difference between pushing your kid to throw around the ol' pigskin and emotionally abusing him because he's not Walter Peyton. I was waiting in line at CVS the other day and the guy in front of me was talking to his son about Little League. The kid wanted to play catcher, but the dad told him he couldn't because he didn't have the speed to do it right. The kid pushed harder, insisting that he really enjoyed being a catcher. The dad looked at him smugly and said, "No, listen, it would be stupid for you to try because you're just not good enough."

I seriously wanted to belt the guy in the mush, but I figured the only thing more psychologically damaging than having your jerk-of-a-dad tell you that you weren't good enough to play a baseball position would be watching your jerk-of-a-dad get cold-cocked by a perfect stranger.

As far as I'm concerned, every kid is "good enough" to play any position in any sport.