Parenting Month 92: camps and martial arts

Now that we are back from travels we are back to the summer. And when kids are involved, this means summer camps. The thing about these summer camps, there are basically half-day camps and full day camps.  And every after school activity under the sun has them. They typically go on for a week at a time.  Because the population changes every week, there really is not an opportunity to go really deep in anything, and get the idea that kids are basically using the summer to get a range of activities in, but not really depth.  And for families like ours that take half the summer to go on vacation, that format works well, take vacation then do camps to fill in the rest of the time.

T had three camps.  Swimming, taekwondo, and robotics.  A now joined in the summer camp fun with swimming, exercise (YMCA), and ballet.  There are some obvious benefits.  For both of them their swimming improved in describable and measurable ways.  The exercise camp seemed fun, but she did not remember much from it. (she thinks that the teachers are using exercise cards like we do at home to create random workouts).  And ballet was fun, but like a typical 4 year old she was sort of doing her own thing.

There is an advantage to socialization, but that will not really be there until we figure out how to be a part of the group negotiating process of kids figuring out what camps they will attend together.  Another advantage is for the longer term relationships.  The TKD camp at his normal TKD school, and the robotics camp where there people who remember T from year to year.

The other bigger event was T joining the Leadership class at his TKD school.  Many martial arts schools have a class where they give additional training. In this school, this includes additional weapons, closer attention to techniques, and closer attention in general.  In addition, this provides the pool for future instructors as well as the training for those who wish to more seriously compete (most of T's competitors in his last tournament were in this program at their schools).

We have been looking at this for some time, but decided to put it off until he finished 2nd grade and had advanced to black belt. Our feelings were that he already is pretty identifiably as the smallest kid in whatever he is in (in his ATA school, there was one smaller around his rank)  We had discussed this with some other parents of kids as they were advancing in rank together to coordinate this decision knowing our kids will want to talk about this at some point.  But what we thought of is that T is the kid who responds well to close attention, and this makes a difference for him. And certainly, his history of placing at both tournaments he has gone to is also a good sign.




Up for August, a visit from a cousin, and one more month before back to school.