Step aside Forest Gump, here comes a three-year-old. While most of us were worrying about whether or not our toddlers knew their colors and could count to ten, Jiang Yunbo, three, has been mastering the subtleties of China's national sport: ping pong. Yunbo hails from Chengdu in the Sichuan Province and has a penchant for wearing awesome Mickey Mouse socks. He also has lightning speed a level of concentration that most parents only dream of.
According to CGTN, Yunbo's grandmother said: "When he was one-and-a-half years old, I thought that he was too little to learn anything, but then it suddenly occurred to me that I might try to teach him to play table tennis, or teach him how to hold the paddle. However, when he held the paddle in his hand, I found that he was quite interested, and from then on, I started (training him) and insisted on letting him play every day while standing by a small tea table."
While ping pong may not be first on the list of skills we think of teaching our kids, it was logical for Jiang Yunbo's grandmother to do this. Years earlier, she herself had been a professional ping pong player. Now she's his coach. We're sure that there's a ping pong gene and Yunbo definitely inherited it.
When he first started playing at the age of one, he and his grandma just bounced the ball on a coffee table they had in the living room. Yunbo was always waiting by the coffee table to play and soon they tried the full-size ping pong table.
Yunbo's mother explained, "We all thought that he wouldn't be able to return the ball when switching (to the full-sized) table. However, he could return plenty of them in a row, which surprised us all."
Now, in addition to playing ping pong better than most of us, Yunbo has also become a star on China's version of TikTok, Douyin, where he has around 54,000 followers.
Clearly Jiang Yunbo is a talented little boy, but his story puts in focus the importance of trying new things with our kids. We might believe that a sport or activity will be too difficult for them, but children often surprise their parents in a good way.
There are many benefits to learning sports; hand-eye coordination is fundamental to healthy development, sports reduce childhood obesity, and kids even learn social skills by being a part of a team.