Like I said in my little “soap box speech” on physical activities for kids and parenting, you do not necessarily have to engage your kid in sports in order for them to get the exercise they need – just playing in the backyard is great exercise for your kids. However, participating in some kind of sport can also be an excellent choice for the entire family. But you need to adopt the right kind of attitude.

I happened to find an excellent article on this topic by Scott Gale, and I will therefore publish it in its entirety here:

Parenting & Sports – The Do’s & Don’ts of Raising Athletic Kids

“The evidence supporting sports participation for young people is overwhelming…It has the power to combat everything from racism to low self-image, to the high-school drop-out rate.” -Sue Castle

Image via Wikipedia

Youth sports are a vital part of our culture and society. Sports help kids develop- physically, mentally and emotionally. Sports teach kids to compete effectively, individually and as a part of a team. Sports instill discipline that will one day drive kids to create and seize opportunity. Games inspire smiles, tears and laughter. In short, youth sports shape the next generation of leaders and well-balanced human beings.Unfortunately, the careless actions of a few adults can ruin this wonderful institution of American culture for kids and adults alike. We see it in the headlines, hear it in the bleachers, and internalize it on the field. Parents yell, complain, insult and even fight.

In light of these modern challenges, how can you, as a parent protect your child’s love and passion for games that are so pure in intent and such an integral part of growing up? How can you, as an adult, improve the experience for other children and their parents?

It’s simple. Follow the rules and stand up for the essence of spirited competition. Before the next time your kid sets foot on a court, diamond, field or any other competitive forum, follow these tips to optimize the situation for you and him both.

1. Understand Purpose

In the world of immediate gratification that we live in, it’s easy to overlook long term purpose, both for kids and adults. The key to getting the desired results is to identify the reasons you and your family dedicate hard work and effort that youth sports take. There are lots of reasons people put their kids in sports; however, the most common ones are to encourage kids to:

• Learn new games
• Stay fit and develop good habits
• Be part of a team
• Have fun…so much so that they want to play again
• Stay out of trouble
• College scholarship (or even professional career)
• Bonding opportunities

In many instances, the will to participate in youth is may be shared by parent and child, but for very different reasons. Other times, one or the other champions the cause. Regardless of the situation, parents must assess why they and/or their children seek out youth leagues, training, etc. As you’ll see, the understanding of such purpose empowers parents to make the right choices to achieve results.

2. Do Your Homework

In populated areas, the choices for youth participation are endless. Which sports and activities should we focus on? Which league has the right level of competition? Which coach will provide the optimal experience? How do I handle it if things do not go as planned?

These are all valid questions that get answered, consciously or unconsciously, before most every registration. In some cases, there are few choices (i.e. you can’t always select your coach) with limited repercussions; however, as players become more specialized and play at a higher level, the selection from a multitude of opportunities may dictate the direction and quality of the experience. In this case, parents must match purpose with expectation to make the best decision, given the choices and circumstances. Like everything else in life, there are no guarantees that intent will become reality; nevertheless, it is clearly the best place to start.

3. Respect All, Fear None

Image by IMAGO escandon via Flickr

For whatever the reason, respect by players and parents for the coaches and referees who make youth sports possible are waning. Parents yell and complain to coaches, umpires and other parents when they feel their child got slighted, overlooking the extraordinary time contribution and patience that such volunteers invest to make the games possible. Kids disrespect coaches and verbalize frustration when they are not placed in the spotlight.Not only do these distractions ruin the game for all involved, they undermine the applications of sports to real life. It’s alright to voice concern, but in the end, parents and kids alike must respect the decisions of those positioned to make them. As kids transition into adulthood, they must understand the realities of authority, teamwork and sportsmanship.

Since parents set the examples, it’s important to realize who can be damaged before an errant comment, complaint or fit of rage leaves the mouth. Youth sports are about kids, we as parents simply cannot afford to overlook that.

4. Enjoy the Pageantry

If you’ve paid attention to the first three tips, this one should be a snap. This is where understanding, preparation and good intentions come together…GAME TIME. If you’re kid is on the right team for the right reasons, you can appreciate the competition and development of your child, even if the team has a limited degree of success.

Youth sports can be some of the most precious memories of both parenting and childhood. Emotional and physical growth, combined with excitement and shared passion, can result in pure joy, even in defeat. Kids often seem to get over a tough loss with a good after-game snack, even when the parents and coaches are still second-guessing a bad call or poor play. Since the goal of it all surrounds the kids, shouldn’t parents follow their lead?

5. Grab a Whistle

If you don’t have the time or temperament to coach, skip this section. However, if you’ve ever thought of coaching, but talked yourself out of it because you just weren’t sure if you skills, patience or flexibility to be coach, then now is the time.Coaching allows parents to bond with their kids in unique and fulfilling ways. Not only are spending time with your kid(s), your sharing a team and competing side-by-side each time you take the field. You can talk endlessly about games, other teams and players, just as you would with a friend. You get to meet a lot of other kids and their parents at a very personal level, so you can surround your children with kids you trust. Finally, you learn a lot about yourself as a parent and leader.

Like most parenting choices, coaching is what you make of it. Embrace it with a good attitude and it can be the experience of a lifetime. Conversely, if you coach to boost your ego or capture unfulfilled championship dreams, your efforts will likely be misguided and end in disappointment.

There’s simply very few things quite as exciting and energizing as clambering to the top of that slide and whooshing all the way to the bottom. The slide is so essential for the overall play experience that you will rarely ever find a swing set system that does not incorporate one.

Liar, liar your pants are on fire!

Recall those ancient metal swing sets with the tall slide that often got so warm in the summer sunlight that you suspected the seat of your pants could actually catch fire if you played long enough? Or maybe your playground included one of those corkscrew metal slides with a tower that contained a strange curving staircase on the inside.

Personally I particularly remember a rather short but steep wooden slide we had in our school yard that the kids – those who where brave enough – used to navigate standing in the winter, when it was covered in ice. (Mental note: Why is it always winter in my anecdotes? )

In any case, I have found that quite a few adults have very fond memories of their local playground slides, maybe that goes for you as well? What if the family goes to a cool water park, could you resist giving one of those long, serpentine shaped water slides a go? I know I couldn’t!

With that being the case it is of course not strange that swing set designers pretty much see the slide as one of their standard add-on components, although they have of course made some safety improvements here and there.

Works great as long as your behind will fit in

What has changed a lot though is the choice of material for the slide. Regardless if the rest of the swing set is constructed from wood or from metal, the slide – just like many other available accessories – seem to almost invariably be made from plastic. The only metal slide I can think of from the top of my head is produced by the company Kettler from Germany.

Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr

Plastic of course makes it easier to produce a slide with smooth rounded shapes and corners, as well as long lasting happy colors. In fact, the slides of today are rather seldom simple flat surfaces with rigid angular edges but are rather built sort of like miniature half-pipes that wrap around the child sliding down it. Naturally this is both safer and more comfortable – unless, like you may have seen in a funny home videos show, someone (usually an adult) with a too large a bottom has a go in the slide.

The heat problem some of the old metal slides had is usually not a problem with the resin or plastic slides. And provided that the size of the slider is well suited for the slide, it is actually quite hard for the child to fall off as he or she goes down.

So all in all, I would almost like to dub the slide as the king swing set accessory. Just like the swing itself it represents a great opportunity to play with gravity.

As I remember it I was a lot more physically active when I was a kid than the youngsters of today are. In summer we rode our bikes like there was no tomorrow and in the winter we used to pretend that our Stiga snow racer sleds where actually motorized snowmobiles – using our legs to propel us through waist deep snow.

When we weren’t doing that we where playing soccer, hockey, badminton or tree climbing like funny looking little monkeys.

We can’t blame it all on video games

Sure, there where computer games back then as well, on the venerable Commodore 64, but nonetheless I think it is fair to say that me and my friends got ourselves quite a daily workout simply from “being kids”.

I have felt for some time now that today seems to be a somewhat different story, with kids using different media for many hours every day. I was beginning to wonder if it is I who am turning into some old fart talking about the “good old days”, or if kids these days indeed are getting lazier, weaker and fatter.

According to the American Heart Association it seems that the latter is, at least to some degree, closer to the truth. According to their fact sheet on children’s need for physical activity:

• Children in the United States today are less fit than they were a generation ago.  Many are showing early signs of cardiovascular risk factors such as physical inactivity, excess weight, higher blood cholesterol and cigarette smoking.

• Inactive children, when compared with active children, weigh more, have higher blood pressure and lower levels of heart-protective high-density lipoproteins (HDL cholesterol).

• Even though heart attack and stroke are rare in children, evidence shows that the process leading to those conditions begins in childhood.

As it turns out, overestimating your child’s activity isn’t that uncommon.

So what can we do about it?

I think it is about time that we, and by that I mean us parents, start to do something in order to ensure the future good health of our currently couch potato kids. And I think it is naive to think that  the situation could somehow be remedied by having more gym classes on the school timetable. While that wouldn’t hurt it won’t work any miracles either.

However, in my opinion you do not necessarily need to enroll your kid in a football team or in a ballet class – unless they really want to do that themselves of course. Because after all, not every child is destined to become a professional football player or “Americas next favorite dancer” on a popular TV-show, and more or less competitive sports aren’t the only way to get more physical exercise anyway.

Spend time with your kids and get some exercise yourself

What you can do will of course depend on the resources available to you, but in my opinion you should try to find something that not only your kid(s) will enjoy, but something that you don’t mind participating in yourself, every now and then.

Whether that is buying a couple of baseball gloves to use in the backyard or if you simply have some suitable nearby trees to start climbing in doesn’t really matter – as long as you do something that will tempt your children to turn off that video game for a few hours to go out and play the old fashioned way.

However, many parent get this wrong and end up scaring their kids instead of encouraging them to explore their physical abilities. How this might play out is illustrated in the below video:

“Mom, Mom, Mom! Can I climb on the outside of the slide?” Sandy Blackard, Founder of Language of Listening, illustrates how to SAY WHAT YOU SEE to set limits without limiting your child.  Compare “No, you might get hurt,” with saying what you see and naming strengths.

I think her example could perhaps have been a bit easier to follow, but otherwise I think Sandy is onto something important – and that is to teach your kids to make good judgments themselves, as to what is safe or not.

With that in mind here are some additional good pointers to remember about playground safety:

Building a Better Playground: Safety, Surfacing, Accessibility and …

The playground industry has changed a lot in a generation. New safety and accessibility guildelines have revolutionized playground design.

PLoS Medicine: School Playground Surfacing and Arm Fractures in …

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission also has information on playground safety, including resources designed for children such as The Further Adventures of Kidd Safety and Little Big Kids, a booklet on play safety written by …

Backyard Playground Safety – Part 1: Preparing For and …

Enjoying life to the fullest is a child’s only concern when it comes to home playground equipment. With proper planning and implementation of the playground safety recommendations presented in this article and in the series of articles …

Playground swing sets have evolved a lot from the most popular models from the 1960s and 1970s, when they used to be dominated by means of a tall metal slide, a sizable metal skeleton with swings that had hefty wooden seats, along with the classic wooden teeter-totter and merry-go-round.

Back then, the contrast between the backyard swing set and the set up included in the playground used to be sizeable; the set in the backyard tended to be considerably smaller and not as sturdy. But as the two of them have changed through the years, they have become progressively more similar.

Wood is tough – in a good way!

The most usual version of both versions today stands out as the wood swing set. Such a set has proven to be more reliable in several ways and, if crafted from the right kind of timber and properly treated, is virtually as tough as a metal set. The old wooden planks that many years ago served as swing seats have been completely replaced either by seats of plastic or resin, or even with plastic belts designed to carry the weight of the child while not causing incidents should they fly loose.

In general, most of the parts of playground swing sets at the moment are made of plastic similar to that of those swing seats, to ensure that now, for instance, playground slides are going to be manufactured from smooth, rounded plastic, putting the old metal slides out to pasture.

A more compact entertaining whole

The current playground swing sets, just like their residential counterparts, additionally are often more compact. They won’t invariably have separate, freestanding structures as they once did, with the swings in a single spot, the slide in another, the teeter-totter in yet another, and so forth. These more modern sets tend to be more modular, some having a modest central tower off of which several features branch. Thus the frame for the swings can come off one side of the tower, whilst the slide extends from a different side along with a climbing wall that might lead off from yet a 3rd area. The swing accessories, in the playground as well as the residential sets, can be appended or altered as the local requirements dictate.

Let’s not forget about safety

One more characteristic of playground swing sets these days is that there’s more attention on health and safety. The wooden models bacame popular soon after playground accidents became a worry a few decades ago, and the new sets have attempted to handle safe practices in additional ways as well.

Several playground manufacturers place these types of outdoor swing sets on softer surfaces, for example pads made of material from recycled tires, as opposed to on wide open ground that gets packed as children play on it. The merry-go-round with its effective centrifugal force and metal rails that might produce severe harm is usually absent today, of course , if the teeter-totter is still around, it’s now cut from plastic and not heavy wood.

The swing sets at recreational areas and playgrounds have evolved to be less hazardous than they once were. With all of the modern materials, colors and accessories, it really is nonetheless just as exciting as it ever was; simply quite a lot safer.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kids’ playground goes high-tech near Edmonton (canada.com)
• Swing Manufacturer Provides Checklist for Playground Safety: American Swing Products’ Safety Checklist Helps Avoid Injuries and Lawsuits (prweb.com)