Your child, once just a sweet kid, now morphs into a Power Ranger at the mall and karate chops the dog at home. Lately, it seems, the only difference between him and Jackie Chan is the hour of their bedtimes. And this morning, right after a rerun of a Ninja Turtles cartoon, he announces that he wants to take karate lessons. So, are you going to let him?
Although martial arts are hugely popular with kids--some 1.4 million now take lessons--much of what goes on inside those storefront karate academies remains, for many parents, a mystery. Will you have to register your child's hands as deadly weapons? Will he be indoctrinated into some mystical Eastern cult?
We decided to find out a little more. We put our questions to a group of prominent martial arts instructors and distilled their answers to create the dialogue that follows. While we didn't find out how to chop a cinder block in half, we did learn that there's more to the martial arts than Bruce Lee and black belts. Exploring these ancient disciplines, in fact, may be just what your little grasshopper needs.
What exactly are the martial arts?Broadly speaking, it's a collective term for a family of fighting disciplines, primarily from Japan, Korea and China.
All that fighting sounds scary.Well, you can't avoid the word martial--they are fighting systems. But keep in mind that most of the systems taught today are methods of self-defense and, ultimately, emphasize avoiding conflict through self-control, self-discipline and improving self-confidence.
"Many kids think they'll learn to kick butt and that their instructor will help them," says Dakin Burdick, a Bloomington, Indiana, instructor who holds black belts in tae kwon do and hapkido. "But I teach kids that the most important thing they'll learn is respect."
Why shouldn't my child just play soccer?Because not every kid enjoys team sports, for starters, and because martial arts teach much more than self-defense. Whereas sports such as soccer and baseball concentrate on physical skills, martial arts emphasize mental skills such as concentration, self-awareness and memory. The mind-body discipline of studying martial arts seems to address the short attention spans of today's children, even those diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
"Karate school is so structured that it's a stabilizing influence on ADD kids--sometimes dramatically so," says Elisa Hendrey, a third-degree black belt who teaches in New York. "Kids come in looking out the window, wiggling, staring into space, and in a couple months you forget they ever had a problem. Other kids come to us with self-confidence problems, because they are small or fragile or being bullied, and they quickly begin to look and feel more confident."
Martial arts training can even be an introduction to good manners. "You wouldn't think of this offhand," says Hendrey, "but we're almost like an Emily Post school. We teach that karate begins and ends with etiquette."
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