It sounds terrible, but I'm starting to hate the Little League World Series. For me, it represents just about everything wrong with the way we're raising our kids today. We're putting too much responsibility on their shoulders too soon, asking them to be too much like adults, and too often living vicariously through them.

These kids are 12 years old. And yet they have uniforms better than many college teams, with shirts with their names on them and fancy batting gloves and individually fitted batting helmets and eye black under their eyes. There are groups of people in the stands holding banners with their names on them. They're on ESPN, and lots of local cable channels on the way up. They're representing their country.

No wonder they cry when they lose. They've been made to believe what they're doing is the most important thing in the world. When, in reality, it's not important at all. The exact same thing happens to them if they win as if they lose: They go back to their hometowns and play with their friends and go to school and do all the things they would do otherwise as 12-year-olds. Is winning fun? Sure. But if we tell our kids that it's only fun if you win we're setting up a lot of kids to be miserable. For every winner, there's a loser.

Yes, lots of major league baseball players once played in the Little League World Series, but not enough to matter. It's not a path to a career in baseball. As I eye all the curveballs being thrown, it looks more like a path to elbow surgery at the age of 17. And even if it were a career path, let's equate it with other career paths they could follow: Are kids performing minor surgery in front of galleries of people at the age of 12? Are kids arguing in front of moot courts at the age of 12?

Whatever happened to sandlot baseball? Getting together with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and playing some modified kind of Wiffle Ball? Do kids even play sports anymore without uniforms and referees and cheering parents equipped with special blends of Gatorade?

The thing is, I love Little League Baseball. I'm on the board of our local league and I coached T-ball this past year. Glen is a Little League coach and sponsors his local team with Kids Crooked House. But we want it to be part of a continuum of play. Some things are organized. Some things are so completely unorganized as to probably be a little dangerous. But it's lots of different kinds of play. Some creative. Some athletic. Some imaginative. Some just plain silly.

I had kids in T-ball with special batting gloves and helmets and their parents would come up to me after games and ask what I thought their kids should be working on that week at home. I told them they should just work on having fun playing with a baseball and a bat and a glove. Skills could come later. They're 5!

Active play doesn't need a uniform or a coach or parental supervision. Parents just need to create an atmosphere where kids are unstressed, happy, and equipped with tools that can spark their imagination.