As a parent, you’re always trying to make sure that your children get every opportunity to grow and develop as a person to the best of their abilities; to reach their full potential. So it’s not hard to understand why you might find yourself a little torn when it comes time to decide on enrolling your child in sports or music classes.

One the one hand, sports have a long and well documented history of providing children with a long list of potential benefits. There’s the friendship and camaraderie, tons of fun, and all the more solid skills, like hand-eye coordination, balance, and leadership skills that all develop as the learn to run, thrown, catch, and play as a team.

Music, on the other hand, also delivers on the promise of developmental benefits. Kids learn important skills like cooperation, active listening, coordination, and a wide variety of other skills. When considering the options, understanding the advantages of both music and sports is essential if you hope to make the best choice for your little one.

So, let’s take a look at how the two compare in a few important area.

Physical Development

There’s no question whatsoever that sports can help immensely with a child’s physical development. Between all the running, jumping, throwing, catching, and kicking, playing sports helps children develop balance, hand-eye coordination, strength, agility, and knowledge of their own body and how it moves. Sports are a wonderful outlet for those high octane children who need to burn off that extra energy. Sports keep keep children active and healthy, reducing the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease, among others.

With all the obvious physical benefits that come hand in hand with playing sports, it can be easy to simply dismiss music’s physical benefits. But that would be a mistake. While it’s true that sports provide more overt physical benefits, that doesn’t mean music doesn’t have any at all. They’re just a little more subtle.

Every instrument in the orchestra can help children develop their coordination and motor skills because they require them to move their hands, arms, and feet. That being said, some instruments do this a bit more than others, and each section offers different benefits. For example, the percussion section is ideal for high energy children because they have to coordinate different movements for each hand and foot. String and keyboard instruments, like the violin and piano, on the other hand, require students to perform different actions on their left and right hands at the same time. Not only can musical instruments help develop fine motor skills and ambidexterity, they can also help kids learn to feel comfortable in inherently uncomfortable physical positions.

The physical benefits of music lessons can also help prepare your children for other activities. For example, the enhanced fine coordination and timing skills learned in class can give them a leg up for other hobbies, like dance, and yes, even sports.

Mental Development

At first glance, there may not seem like too much to be gained from sports when it comes to your child’s mental and academic development and growth, but that’s not so. Possibly the most significant mental benefits your child can gain from sports are teamwork and self-discipline. Self-discipline, in particular, lends itself quite well to success in school. Kids who participate in sports learn to focus, and avoid procrastination. The best example I could find for this was the idea of writing an essay. The mind tends to wonder a bit while writing an essay, but children who have developed focus through sports are more able to stay on task, and use their time efficiently.

Music lessons offer a more direct connection to academic skills. In fact, music and math are so intertwined they’re basically one and the same. Through an understanding of beats, rhythm, and scales, kids learn division, fractions, and pattern recognition. Music seems to help the young brain develop in such a way that it has a better understanding of other, seemingly unrelated areas of math.

Music lessons, and particularly performances, work student’s short- and long-term memory, as they first learn, and then recite their songs. And music lessons can even introduce children to basic physic; plucking the strings on a guitar can introduce complicated concepts, like harmonic and sympathetic vibrations, in a very real world, down to earth sort of way. Even non-string instruments can teach kids some interesting scientific principles.

Emotional Development

Sports can, of course, help children with important emotional development. As they learn the new skills associated with the sport of their choice, they learn to take constructive criticism so they can improve their skills, without getting upset or insulted. With skill comes self-esteem and confidence. Sports teach kids how to not only win with grace and class, but also to handle defeat with dignity, and not be a “sore-loser.” These are all clearly essential emotional lessons for life, especially as an adult in the working world.

Of course, music is also able to impart many of the vital lessons as well. Music lessons offer a safe environment for students to give and accept constructive criticisms. Just like in sports, kids learn to take negative input, and turn it into a positive experience that helps them build their skill and self-confidence. Group lessons, in particular, are very similar to sports in this ways. Children can see that nobody is perfect, including themselves and their peers. And they learn to work together as a group, or dare I say it, a “team,” to improve together.

And add to that the skills that come with performing in front of an audience. Presenting yourself in public, whether you’re playing music or simply speaking in front of a crowd, is an important skill. And luckily for music students, the self-esteem gained from performing is easily transferable to public speaking and other similar situations.

Clearly, signing your children up for a sports team will be a fun, and educational experience for them, but so can learning to read and play music. Which one is better? Well, both help with coordination and physical development, both can help with academic performance, and both require teamwork and can improve self-esteem. So, in the end, after all this, it may be best to try to enroll your child in both, and then let them decide which they would prefer to stick with.

In the end, as a parent you want your child to develop all the skills they need to reach their full potential, and sometimes it’s better to just take a step back, take some of the pressure off, and let them shine all on their own!