Enabling Children To Succeed
Knowledge truly is power, but imparting it is easier said than done. You’ve tried to teach your children by telling them. They learn, more often than not, through hands-on interaction, or watching. When you try to tell them something, they’re thinking other thoughts, and may not even take in half what you say.
Parenting is one of the most challenging things a person can do, and it makes sense to find means other parents have used to help impart vital life lessons. When you equip your children with the necessary knowledge, they’re more able to handle real-world situations where that knowledge is integral. This is one reason so many parents involve children in sports.
Certainly there are concerns by some parents pertaining to their observation of adults who, while playing no sports themselves, become overly involved in what are essentially pastimes. Some parents instead have children get involved in other things, like technology; but there’s a double-edged sword everywhere you go.
Technology can teach worthwhile lessons, but its overuse can be bad for mental health; just as sports teach worthwhile lessons, but can result in adult fanatics. The key is balance. That said, sports tend to have collateral benefits far outweighing detriments. Children must be technically literate today, but even in the latest tech, there are lessons from sports which prove valuable. Four will be considered here.
1. Resilience
Perseverance in the face of terrible obstacles, and pushing resiliently through those obstacles are core components to virtually all sporting events. The dancers must choreograph, prepare, and perform. The baseball teams must run drills and teach strategy dynamics based on differing innings—this information can be very abstract, and almost impossible to teach youngsters except through experience.
Abstractions within sports teach children to push through obstacles whose resolution is unclear, and additionally to think critically in an almost instinctual way. As a means of giving your children hands-on experience in overcoming difficulties, both personal and exterior, it’s hard to do better than involving them in team sports of some kind—mainstream or otherwise.
2. Sportsmanship
Sporting events are going to teach young ones how to lose and win graciously. Gloating winners are as bad as sore losers. But there have to be winners and losers in sports, just as life. Teaching children to deal with peers on either side in areas where mistakes can be made and addressed—like sporting events—helps equip them for such scenarios in the adult world.
3. Physical Health
Eating right must be combined with proper physical exercise in order to help your children fully flourish. The best way to maintain a healthy weight is to burn more calories than are ingested. Sports can be the perfect way to help your children maintain an even keel in terms of physical and nutritional health.
Activities where little physicality takes place tend to encourage poor health collaterally. Certainly they’re necessary, but you need to balance them out through some sort of athletic opportunity for your children; sports fill this need, and act as a basis from which good habits in adult life may be established.
4. Working With A Team
A team has to compromise, negotiate, plan, practice, execute, and then contend with the outcome of their actions. Teams in sports do this just as teams designing technology, or managing schools.
In dancing, teams have to function so closely they almost appear synchronous; and dance costumes for every type of routine can be put together to expand the effect of this synchronicity visually, while simultaneously being very affordable.
In football, concerted swift activity must be combined with teamwork and intuition. In ice hockey, strengths and weaknesses in terms of skater ability must be carefully balanced together to face opposing teams at greatest potential strength. These are all good lessons for youngsters.
More Than Just A Game Or Exercise
Certainly sports provide excellent opportunity to keep your children busy and teach them. They can also teach teamwork, help meter nutritional balance, facilitate sportsmanlike behavior, and foster resilience. If you haven’t involved your young ones in sports, there are many good reasons to.
