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I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

Though teenagers are generally very interested in sports, they must realise that education is the most important thing in their lives. They must find the right balance.

Sport is not just about entertainment. It is equally about winning and losing, pooling and galvanising the energy of the youth, upgrading people's physical fitness and mental prowess.

I know many people who are actually queasy about the idea that their kids may harbour sporting ambitions.

Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.

We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.

Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.

When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Kids who don't play are not just at greater risk of falling behind academically, but also of becoming overweight or obese, failing to integrate socially, and even engaging in criminal activity.