Don’t make your children quit to study!
Quitting all fun stuff doesn’t encourage discipline. If anything, I’d argue we need to show our children how their dance or exercise can help with their exam revision. It can help manage stress and refocus their brain.
Today the common practice of well-meaning parents are encouraging their kids to stop dancing or extra-curricular sports because of GCSEs or A-levels.
Whilst I understand the reasoning, it’s something I’m grateful my parents didn’t do this. Yes I scaled things back but there was no question of stopping. I needed the active and creative release.
I can remember using my dance classes as a reward for getting a few good hours of studying.
The British Heart Foundation released statistics, which revealed 20 million Brits are risking early death due to inactivity. And with only 1 in 10 girls aged 14 currently meeting the government recommendations for exercise, surely the last thing we need to do, as parents, is to make them stop and study.
What messages are we putting out about sports and activity if we classify them as optional extras, to be dropped as soon as we need to focus on the serious stuff of examinations?
Surely at times of stress we should be helping them manage stress and boost brain function. Activity and creative pursuits do just this.
Does quitting actually help kids to pass exams or improve their grades? At an age when teenagers’ brains are wired to seek and get high on pleasure, surely forcing children to give up on the fun and creative stuff is a recipe for a deeply miserable time.
I’m not an education expert. I can’t comment on exam technique or revision, other than from my own experiences as a straight A student, who continued to dance between the ages of 14 and 21.
I see new mums whose bodies would be coping so much better with the strains of pregnancy and birth if they had only moved more and been stronger during the pre baby years. I see middle aged women struggling with the stresses and anxieties of juggling ‘all the stuff’ who lack a creative or physical outlet to help manage it. I see women post menopause and retirement who are seeing the early signs of reduced bone density and hips that won’t move because they have forgotten how.
There is such a focus on exams, academic attainment, tests and achieving that we’ve somehow forgotten the importance of life. Is it any wonder that we can’t squeeze in an hour for a run or have to manage on super speedy workouts because we don’t have the time for the thing that makes us happy and healthy? Because we’ve learned that sport is a nice, optional extra.
I’m not just talking ideal world stuff here. I’m talking longevity and remaining fit enough to be active throughout our non work years. I’m talking scientifically proven FACTS that sitting down for long periods of time is worse for us than smoking!
Sitting down has also been linked with breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Sport and activity need to be AS important as exams. An exercise habit could keep you alive for your grandchildren. An A-level won’t.
Movement and impact on joints (along with nutrition) as a child, set up good bone density for life. Sitting down for long periods of time is like taking a top of the range sports car and leaving it in a damp garage for years with no servicing.
Activity can help manage stress and anxiety. We know that exercising outside, in green spaces, actually changes the brain. It stops us brooding and improves our mood.
Quitting all fun stuff doesn’t encourage discipline. If anything, I’d argue we need to show our children how their dance or exercise can help with their exam revision. It can help manage stress and refocus their brain.
In fact some studies have shown that some exercise can actually help with laying down information in the brain and subsequent recall. Don’t hang up your leotard. Aside from potentially saving your sanity and your life it could also boost your grades!