Has this happened to you? Your daughter comes home from soccer practice and defiantly declares, “I can’t stand my coach, my team is awful and I don’t even like soccer. I quit!” Your parental thermostat kicks in as you try to gently lower the temperature in the room with those responses that all kids despise, “Oh, come on now, it can’t be that bad” or “But you’re good at soccer” and finally, “You know our rule, once you start something, you have to finish it. You can’t quit.”

You’ll talk to her coach, you’ll buy her new cleats, even get her on a better team. But as parents, we often don’t even consider the remote possibility that… wait for it…. our child does not want to play soccer, or basketball or golf or even Aussie rules football.

Well-meaning articles about the tragedy of kids quitting sports are just a Google search away (heck, I even wrote one.)

Usually, we place the blame elsewhere with the assumption that all kids love sports, so if mine doesn’t then something must be wrong with the system.

Instead, we should delve deeper into the unique interests and needs of our son or daughter to find out if there is a better matched activity out there that doesn’t involve a ball, puck or $200 shoes.

To begin this discovery, we turn to Dr. Stuart Brown, author of Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul and founder of the National Institute for Play. After years as a psychiatrist and researcher trying to understand why violent criminals became who they are (lack of childhood play), he has become the authoritative voice campaigning for more play time for kids in school and at home.

“The act of play itself may be outside of ‘normal’ activities,” he wrote in Play. “The result [of play] is that we stumble upon new behaviors, thoughts, strategies, movements, or ways of being. We see things in a different way and have fresh insights.”