Kids dance is a super fun way to keep even the most dedicated couch potato (or digital games aficionado) to stay active. Helping children find activities they like is the key to exercise motivation – and dance offers a lot of variety and creative expression while building their confidence, emotional resilience and increasing essential coordination skills at a time when it’s most needed.
Why should we encourage kids to dance?
Dance at preschool level brings with it a range of lifelong benefits, including reducing obesity, healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and helping to set up and normalise everyday habits that lead to a balanced lifestyle.
There’s a lot of health-related evidence to show that children who participate actively in the arts spend far less time in front of a computer screen and are at reduced risk of developing health problems later in life.
Dancing makes children feel physically refreshed and improves their mood. Even group dance for toddlers can release stress and tackle anxiety while providing a healthy outlet for emotions and imagination.
Dance also helps kids develop a greater range of movement early on and interact with or interpret the space around them more successfully. This, in turn, helps develop other physical skills, such as riding a bike or multitasking with aplomb.
Finally, being part of a group activity teaches vital social, patience, listening abilities and leadership skills.
Start young. Show interest often.
While many playgroups and preschools offer kids dance as part of their curriculum these days, there are a few things you can do as a parent to help motivate your child to stay active at home.
1. Encourage practice at home. When it comes to dancing for toddlers or pre-schoolers, you'll need to make practising a game. Ask your little one to access their imagination, let them perform dance shows for the family and make sure you applaud with gusto. The trick is to build excitement about dancing whenever you can.
2. Catch a performance. Treat your pre-schooler to a dance show, whether traditional ballet, tap or something more modern. Choose a matinee performance where it's likely lots of children of varying ages are in attendance – if your child grows bored during a long show, it won't be as noticeable! Talk about how enjoyable the performance will be/ was to associate dance with a sense of wonder and learning.
3. Learn the moves. Ask your little dancer to teach you their favourite dance moves – it will make them feel more confident. Don’t be tempted to take over if they get something wrong, just go with the flow and shake your booty!
4. Play it again, Sam. If your kid’s dance teacher can give you a list of tunes played in class, play them often at home. It helps your kids associate the music with the moves, building muscle and kinaesthetic memory. If they don’t want to dance, that’s fine – sometimes just listening reinforces the activity.
The impact of kids dance has the potential to be enormous – encouraging your children to be active in this way helps them grow into more interesting, creative and motivated adults.