ESPN did an Outside the Lines on kids participating in MMA awhile back (find highlights here) and the question of whether or not youth should be involved in mixed martial arts is a question that I get asked a lot.

To me, it seems fairly simple: kids shouldn’t be doing it. At least not the way it's shown in some of the OTL clips. Kids sparring without headgear is just stupid. If kids are interested in it, there are a lot of different ways to go about it. The most obvious is going the wrestling route and developing the rest of your game when you are older. Another route, that seems easy enough to me, would be to have kids training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and boxing (or even training Muay Thai) without sparring.

Kids can get the grappling side of things down or even learn techniques and strikes in Muay Thai. They shouldn’t be sparring until they are older and even then, they shouldn’t be working without headgear.

Does this make sense to anyone else?