Children have a natural urge to move from an early age. They love to jump, run, climb and romp – sports are simply fun for children and important for physical development. A variety of different sports prevents boredom in the first place and gets both the body and the brain moving.
Sports for children
Children learn through movement. With sports, the posture of children is promoted, the torso muscles are strengthened and thus ultimately even in childhood back problems can be prevented. In keeping with the motto “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, sport is of course also important for parents.
In addition to serving as a role model, shared sports experiences can also strengthen family cohesion. Climbing mountains together on a mountain bike, roaring through the fields on inline skates or simply playing catch – everything is more fun together, and that goes for sports, too. And don’t be disappointed if your youngest suddenly outruns you in a race – kids who play sports from an early age are in great shape and have enormous competitive zeal.
If your child can emerge as a proud winner, his or her self-confidence is also boosted at the same time. For this reason, team sports in particular are a good opportunity for children to acquire team skills. In a group, social competence is learned through play – and defeats can be overcome much better together than alone. This also strengthens team spirit.
Preventing dangers
Since children usually cannot yet realistically recognize and assess possible dangers, it is important that parents, teachers or coaches provide assistance. Safety is an important aspect for healthy sports, but children also need to fall sometimes, of course in a secured framework. This is the only way they can develop the right body feeling for balance and experience their environment.
However, it is important that children always wear the right equipment for the sport in question so that small accidents do not have long-term consequences. For some sports, such as bicycling, rollerblading, skiing or inline skating, a helmet is an absolute must.
Since children are still in the middle of their physical development, the selection of suitable shoes is also an important criterion for successful sports. Pressing shoes are not only uncomfortable and a hindrance during competitions, but can also have a negative effect on the development of the feet. The best thing to do here is to seek advice from a sports retailer, by also measuring children’s feet to find the right sports shoe.
Which sport is suitable for which child?
The focus should always be on the fun and experience factor for the child. In infancy, the first movement experiences can be gained with baby swimming. Toddlers love to move to music, here too there are offers around parent-child gymnastics and Pekip, in everyday life prove themselves slide cars and from about two years also running bikes, with which children can learn very well coordination and thereby also facilitate the later transition to the bike.
From the age of 5, children can then try out a variety of sports so that their sporting inclinations can be identified. Even though many boys in particular would like to lift weights together with their dad in the gym – this should be an absolute no-no until puberty, as this could have harmful effects on the children’s growth processes.
Classic boy and girl sports
By the way, children build muscles in sports quite automatically and with almost any sport, targeted muscle training with weights is completely unnecessary here. Classically, soccer is still very popular with boys, with girls it is the sports of dancing and horseback riding. Of course, the interest of certain sports is also related to the interests of friends, children often like to try sports that their best friend is already doing with enthusiasm.
Versatility is perfectly ok, because each sport also addresses a different effect in the body. Whether judo, tennis, field hockey, track and field, handball or ballet, any kind of exercise promotes the development of motor skills and can help relieve school stress or frustration.
