When I was a kid, this story would have been an Onion parody (that is, if the Onion had been founded before 1988, but that's not the point. ANYWAY).

But it's all too real:

The idea that mental coaching can help the youngest athletes has pervaded the upper reaches of the country's zealous youth sports culture. In the pursuit of college scholarships and top spots on premier travel clubs, the families of young athletes routinely pay for personal strength coaches, conditioning coaches, specialized skill coaches like pitching or hitting instructors, nutritionists and recruiting consultants. Now, the personal sports psychologist has joined the entourage.

"Parents tell me that they've put so much money into their child's athletic development that they're not going to leave any stone unturned if it might help them achieve," said Marty Ewing, a former president of the Association of Applied Sport Psychology. "And obviously, we do have ways to help enrich performance."

Granted, the parents I know are not a scientific sample. But I've yet to meet a one who is at all pleased with the hypercompetitiveness of modern child sports programs. It's common knowledge that the days of a superlative high-school athlete lettering in two or three sports are over. Today he or she must pick one sport -- and focus on it with something like semi-professional intensity.

My (again, unscientific) guess is that parents aren't thrilled with it, and yet feel compelled to run with the herd rather than put their kids at a competitive disadvantage. In other words, it's the same kind of building-the-perfect-beast mentality that has parents parking their infants in front of dubiously effective "Baby Einstein" videos.

It seems to me that, children being the incomplete beings that they are, at some point this insane kind of ... what to call it? ... "achievementarianism" will reach the point of diminishing returns. I'm reminded of wrestling programs wherein boys are directed to shed pounds in order to compete in a lower weight class, and thus gain an advantage in strength: If the other team's employing the same tactic, don't you have two equally weakened wrestlers?

Similarly with the one-sport-only, junior-Olympic craze in child sports: Sooner or later, anyone with the financial means is going to figure it out and we'll have reached a higher point of equilibrium.

Only by then, we'll have kissed goodbye to any semblance of a normal childhood.