Seven-year-olds in sand traps

It's the documentary everyone's been waiting for: seven-year-olds playing golf! Honestly, this looks like it could shine a tremendously bad light on the parents of these kids. Although excellence, especially excellence at a young age, is intensely interesting, it's hard to imagine the emotional toll this kind of competition takes on youngsters. The line, "that golf course has crippled many a person," absolutely made me cringe.

This brings to mind all those pageant shows that expose the way the kids and parents act behind the scenes. The situations are stressful to watch and there is a sort of inhumanity to the whole thing. But there is also a great deal of humanity in these shows because makes them so hard to watch is that they expose something about ourselves.

We all want to be good, shockingly good at something, but we want that to be on our terms. We feel for the kids because what if it was us who were talented and pushed into something at a young age.

The issue isn't cut and dry, but it's interesting to think about. What if these 7 year olds had been us or our kids?