Plan A for my daughter is martial arts; the wife and I quibble a bit about what to look for when the time comes. I am much more tolerant of injury risks, on the grounds that no-contact martial arts doesn’t advance the purpose of self defense. I would consider MMA; wife is opposed to MMA chiefly on cultural grounds.
I would also like her to do one of the team competition sports, by which I mean thing like soccer, basketball, and volleyball over track, wrestling, or swimming. The latter set is no different from totally individual competition, because there is nothing to do except well by yourself.
The thing is that I need a way to teach coordination, and individual competition doesn’t do that. The critical lessons come from situations where you need to perform with other people; that part of the job is putting other people in a position to succeed, and that you are dependent on others to put you in a position to succeed.
There isn’t another reliable way to do this, unless the family undertakes it specifically. School is aggressively, totally useless for the purpose; group projects are common but only serve to emphasize the terrible state of baseline coordination.
I remind myself from time to time that these risks all amount to normality. So all the nuance pays out as “Yes, will let my kid play football.”
Seems reasonable. I think the variance MA school to MA school is so incredibly high that it’s almost impossible to layout a plan other than “visit schools within a reasonable trip and see”.
Plan A for my daughter is martial arts; the wife and I quibble a bit about what to look for when the time comes. I am much more tolerant of injury risks, on the grounds that no-contact martial arts doesn’t advance the purpose of self defense. I would consider MMA; wife is opposed to MMA chiefly on cultural grounds.
I would also like her to do one of the team competition sports, by which I mean thing like soccer, basketball, and volleyball over track, wrestling, or swimming. The latter set is no different from totally individual competition, because there is nothing to do except well by yourself.
The thing is that I need a way to teach coordination, and individual competition doesn’t do that. The critical lessons come from situations where you need to perform with other people; that part of the job is putting other people in a position to succeed, and that you are dependent on others to put you in a position to succeed.
There isn’t another reliable way to do this, unless the family undertakes it specifically. School is aggressively, totally useless for the purpose; group projects are common but only serve to emphasize the terrible state of baseline coordination.
I remind myself from time to time that these risks all amount to normality. So all the nuance pays out as “Yes, will let my kid play football.”
Seems reasonable. I think the variance MA school to MA school is so incredibly high that it’s almost impossible to layout a plan other than “visit schools within a reasonable trip and see”.