Why You Should Enroll Your Children in Martial Arts
[embed]https://youtu.be/N68U2l-aUvI[/embed] Enrolling your children in activities that will keep them entertained and teach them valuable life lessons in the process is always a worthwhile pursuit. While there’s certainly no shortage of activities to choose from, one of the most beneficial activities that children can engage in is martial arts. Below, we’ll take a look at a few of the reasons why enrolling your children in martial arts is such a great idea.
Martial Arts Creates Confidence
Confidence is one of the most valuable gifts that you can give to a child. It’s something that will help them through any rough patches in their childhood and set them up for future success.
Of course, confidence isn’t something that you can wrap up in a box and hand to them – confidence has to be earned.
Like adults, children generate confidence by being good at something, and being good at martial arts certainly fits the criteria for creating confidence. Martial arts is arguably better at creating confidence than most any other sport since knowing that you can defend yourself is confidence-inspiring in and of itself.
Combine that with the fact that being good at most anything inspires confidence, and martial arts becomes an excellent way to build up your children’s self-esteem.
Martial Arts is Excellent Exercise
In a day and age where most forms of entertainment involve staring at a screen, it can be difficult to ensure that your children are getting the amount of exercise that they need to grow up strong and healthy.
If you are looking for a fun way to get your children involved with a physical activity that they will actually enjoy, martial arts is an excellent option to consider. Martial arts training is a serious workout. It improves cardio, improves flexibility, strengthens muscles, and more.
Best of all, it’s enjoyable and purpose-driven enough that it doesn’t feel like exercising just for the sake of exercising. Martial arts provides an opportunity for children to get plenty of exercise in a way that is both fun and beneficial in many other ways as well.
Martial Arts Sharpens the Mind
In addition to training the body, martial arts also trains the mind. In fact, martial arts is, in many ways, more of a mental activity than it is a physical one.
Martial arts requires strategy, memory, quick decision making, and a wide range of other mental skills, and these mental skills are taught in tandem with the physical moves themselves.
Your child may not make a career out of the things they learn in a martial arts class – though some people do – but they will learn mental skills that they can apply in other areas of their lives.
They’ll Likely Make New Friends
Martial arts gyms are most often made up of a very tight-knit group of people. If you choose to enroll your children in a martial arts class where there are already other children their age, they should have no problem making new friends in little time at all.
There’s just something about training with someone that develops a very close relationship. Though martial arts is more of an individual pursuit than other sports like soccer or basketball, teamwork and group participation still play constant, important roles in martial arts training.
Making friends is one of the most beneficial things that children can do for a wide range of reasons. If you want to place your children in an environment where making friends becomes easy, martial arts is the perfect activity to enroll them in.
Martial Arts Teaches Self Defense
One of the most frightening realities that new parents must come to grips with is the fact that we live in a world that isn’t always safe or kind. There are dangerous people in the world, and, as sad as it is, young children are not immune to these dangers.
Martial arts is an activity that can be enjoyed as a friendly sport and never put to use in a real-life situation. At its core, though, martial arts is teaching you how to defend yourself. We can all hope that a child never has to use the things they learn in a martial arts class outside of the gym, but they’ll still be equipped with the skills to defend themselves if a dangerous situation is thrust upon them.
After all, it’s much better to know how to defend yourself and never need to than it is to need to defend yourself and not know how.
One common myth about martial arts that is important to clear up in this section as well is that martial arts turns people into violent fighters. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Martial arts gives children a way to harmlessly channel their aggression so that it isn’t channeled in destructive ways. In fact, children with anger issues are often enrolled in martial arts as a way to teach them not to lash out and provide them with a safe way to channel their energy.
Likewise, one of the most important lessons that martial arts teaches starting day one is that fighting outside of class is unacceptable. There’s an honor code to martial arts, and students are held to a high standard by both their instructors and their peers.
