Are Team Sports the Best Idea As a Children’s Fitness Activity?

cheesy music blasting over the speakers and sweaty people running on a stationary treadmill. To kids on the other hand, exercise and fitness are all about just doing what comes naturally – running about, climbing, falling, just being active. As kids grow older, team sports can be really great as a safe way to try out life skills. Team sports can help a child learn to work with other kids, share stuff, boost self-esteem, and generally fall in love with life. This is one problem here – what do you do if your child is not a natural athlete, or just doesn’t like sports?

To begin with, to not be interested in organized sports can be quite normal – it could conceivably be put down to a matter of personal taste. But you could try to understand your child’s reasons first to make sure that all is well. Perhaps there are deeper concerns that your child has, that come out of social anxiety. Preschool kids often have team sports made available to them; even so, it is not until the age of seven or so that children actually have the attention span or the mental development to actually grasp everything that goes on in a game. Kicking a ball while running or catching a ball, takes a good deal of limb-eye coordination; a child who hasn’t had the time to practice these skills properly might just not see the point. What you can do then is, you can practice at home with the child, the kind of skills that you believe she will need, playing a team sport at school. In the reassuring surroundings of home with no one else around to catch their failures, they might open up.

Your children’s fitness and health may be a great reason why you wish to have them take a team sport. But there are real reasons why they may not yet be ready for prime time. To begin with, the school sporting league can be all about the competition and the winning, and this can be off-putting to your child. Most children aren’t really appreciative of the pressure of competition until they hit the age of 12 or so You could try some places like the YMCA where they don’t keep score, to help a child to find her groove without the pressure.

Kids grow up at different rates. While one child may take up to the age of ten to gain excellent hand-eye coordination, another kid might do it at the age of six. Kids can also take time to come to terms with how hard it can be to keep up with everyone else. If your child really does need time to grow into her shoes, you can find children’s fitness activities outside of team sports. Swimming, horseback riding, golf, skate boarding, yoga, there are any number of choices for what a child can do to stay fit. Raising a child is all about finding a balance between what you decide is right for your child what the child wants for herself. With a little thought, finding the balance should not be all that hard.

Healthy Competition In Team Sports Teaches Life Skills

The word “competition” brings to mind images of athletes or sports teams striving to do their best and working hard to accomplish significant goals. For most of us, achieving goals and enjoying life is at least partially dependent on working together and getting along with others. Many of these essential relational skills are learned in the developing years as children move from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. Given the importance of these key life skills, our society would benefit greatly by ensuring that kids are provided with ample opportunities for working together and getting along with people. Such relational skills can be effectively taught (and caught) in the context of an organized sports program.

It seems that kids are born with an innate sense of competition and a desire to win. Our society, schools, and sports programs all cater to this inclination to compete with various games and challenges. Such challenges have been a part of human society from the beginning, and this competition develops a number of important skills for use throughout life.

As an example, the desire to be the champion and top dog often pushes people further than they would choose to go on their own. This dogged determination to win is what drives Olympic athletes, CEOs, and many leaders to attain to lofty positions. However, the downside of unchecked competition is that negative traits including roughness, a domineering attitude, and unsportsmanlike conduct can develop and can take over a person. Such negative traits can be very harmful, and if not kept in check, can lead to damaged and broken relationships.

This danger for unguided winners to develop poor attitudes is precisely the reason we should encourage children to get involved in team sports programs and other organizations where healthy competition is encouraged and promoted. It is often within these organizations that essential life skills are taught and where the development of proper attitudes can be nurtured.

By participating in organized team sports, kids can begin to truly experience the thrill of winning and the pain and discouragement of defeat. By experiencing these emotions in the context of their sports community, children can begin to understand the roots of their emotions and how their emotions can affect others. In addition, parents and coaches can observe how kids react and can provide encouragement and guidance as needed when and if inappropriate behavior and reactions are observed.

Within the context of an organized sports program, a skilled coach can help and encourage the winners to revel in the victory, and yet do so in a way that does not put down the losers. In fact, if the kids on the winning team can learn how to reach out and encourage kids on the losing team, they have learned an extremely valuable lesson that will serve them well throughout their lives. In the same way, the losers must learn the essential skill of losing well and not withdrawing in self-pity or lashing out at the winners, their teammates, or their coach. Winning and losing are a continual part of life, and developing key skills to cope with victory and loss will go a long way in helping young people cope effectively with the ups and downs of life.

In developing life skills, there is a significant difference between team sports such as basketball, baseball, and soccer and individual sports such as tennis and racquetball. Individual sports typically focus on developing the competitive side of an individual, but organized sports programs can teach so much more. On a team, the children learn to work together to accomplish things that they could never do on their own. In addition, the coach can provide encouragement and direction, and the kids themselves can encourage each other when they are down. On a team, kids can also develop the confidence to try new things that they might otherwise not try. Such an encouraging and supportive environment is rarely found in an individual sport, but can be commonly found on sports teams. Out of necessity, teams learn to work together to accomplish mutual goals and such skills will help carry them through life and work.

In summary, the competition and cooperation that occurs in organized sports programs can be very healthy and helpful for developing essential life skills. In a well-run program, team sports encourage children to work together, encourage one another, and get along with others. A quality and gifted coach can develop these skills in children, and our children would be well-served into adulthood and our society would benefit by having these skills engrained into our children’s character.

To run an effective team sports program, you need a good coach an

Benefits of Team Sports

Getting kids to get up and move around can be really tough in this era where electronic gadgets magically magnetize kids to couches. One way to get kids up and moving is to add other kids to the mix. Then sprinkle in some exercise with a dose of healthy competition, and you’ve got a great recipe for getting your kids involved in a team sport. There are many benefits to kids participating in team sports, among them include social, physical and emotional aspects.

Most kids grow up believing the world revolves around them. And some parents believe that too. It’s wonderful that kids are able to feel the loving arms of the world embrace them, however there comes a point where they should probably learn that other people exist also. With team sports, especially when kids are young, everyone gets to participate. This allows each kid to see that everyone is a valuable member of the team and everybody gets a chance to have their turn. What’s more, this gives a chance for kids to celebrate other kids’ successes and to be happy for someone else when they do well because it benefits the whole team.

Another great reason to get involved in team sports is to introduce your child to another positive adult in their life. If your child’s coach has experience with children and is a positive role model, they would be someone you can easily trust with your child. This offers your child another adult they can talk to and interact with, further establishing trust with other people and gaining a possible mentor.

Anyone who has spent much time around children knows that attention span is not their greatest strength. However, to become adept at any given sport (as with many things in life) practice is imperative. The patience it takes to repeat the motions of athletics is a great lesson to a child. They can’t just give up after 2 or 3 times, they have to keep at it in order to get better. Whether it’s repeating the same drills over and over, or just getting to a daily or weekly practice, they will hopefully realize that their persistence will pay dividends in the long run.
An opportunity to practice your kid’s sport with them is also a great way to spend time together. This gives you a chance to get a little exercise yourself, as well as providing a venue for you to have teachable moments with your child in a loving and supportive manner.

Some real-life skills that children develop while participating in team sports include:

• Teamwork and cooperation
• Leadership
• Self esteem
• Goal setting and achieving
• Friendship
• Respect for other people and taking turns
• Sense of belonging to a group or team
• Physical coordination
• Shared experiences with their peers

Some hard lessons your child will become familiar with, and hopefully learn how to deal with in a constructive manner include learning how to be a good loser as well as a good winner, learning how to communicate with other people to achieve a common goal, and overcoming shyness in order to communicate and perform in front of and with others.

Some kids want to be the star of the show and maybe they need to learn how to share the spotlight; while some kids would rather hang back and fly under the radar, and could use some encouragement to let their star shine. With a mix of kids who all have different personalities, the hope is they will be able to observe and learn from each other.

The final benefit of organized team sports is for your kid to get out and have fun. Too often these days we hear about parents, coaches and even players who take games and matches too seriously and end up verbally or even physically assaulting a referee, coach or someone else in front of the impressionable children who are playing the game. This is unnecessary and unforgivable. Let th

The Importance of Team Sports For Children

As their children grow up, every set of parents has a different idea as to what should be the main focus of their upbringing and how they should spend their free time, especially when it comes to extra-curricular activities. Some parents place a huge emphasis on academics and want their children doing extra reading or working with a tutor. Other parents are heavily into sports and want their children to focus on sports. Some parents simply want their children to be children and don’t push them in any particular direction at all.

In most cases, schools give children at least some opportunity to participate in a team sport. Along with the team sports that are taught during physical education classes, there are usually a few varsity sports teams that will represent the school while competing against other schools in the area. In addition to this, most communities have a few organized sports leagues that children can be active in.

In my opinion, participation in team sports is vital to healthy social, physical and emotional development. Participating in a sports team exposes children to a range of challenges in a team environment where they are forced to work with others, rely on others at times and also to encourage or root for others on their team. All of this leads to the development of a cooperative mindset. Now although all of this sounds ideal, I am aware that it does not always work out this way. Some times a child might be a ‘ball hog’ and refuse to pass the ball, or want to score all of the goals themselves. But with time, even this child learns at some point that they must work with others if they want to see true success.

Some kids just love sports and have a natural tendency towards them. There is very little that a parent could do to stop a child like this from participating in sports. Other children are quite nonchalant about sports, and some children even hate sports. A variety of factors can influence the way that children feel about sports. Sometimes they are shy or insecure about the abilities yet with a little encouragement they will get out there and do fine. At times, a child may have a physical attribute that they are conscious or overly conscious about that stops them from doing a sporting activity they would love. I encourage parents to find at least one team sport that their children can become involved in. Not all team sports have to be high impact activities or ‘popular’ sports. A swim team is great for a child that is not boisterous or overly physical. Some schools have sailing as an extra curricular activity which again falls outside of the typical team sport.

I believe that team sports teach children not only how to compete, but how to compete fairly within structured boundaries. This is an important life lesson and the skills and the disciplines that they learn in sports will definitely last them a lifetime. Team sports will teach children how to communicate, since most team sports require children not only to talk to each other while the activity is taking place but also how to plan strategies for an upcoming event and how to debrief or review things that have happened in a game. Perhaps most importantly, team sports teach children how to succeed and how to fail since inevitably throughout each season of their sport their team will do both. With every win and loss, children learn coping skills. These again are important skills to develop in a child and they will last them throughout life.

Susan Roberts writes freelance for a number of different companies including KS Child Locate on locate child mobile

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