Karate Kids?

[DWx]

First of all, Hello! This is my first post on these forums. I practise Wado Ryu Karate in Victoria, Australia. I'm a Nidan with almost 10 years experience. So, by comparison, I'm still fairly new to the Martial Arts.

I'm becoming concerned by the number of young children joining the dojo where I train. Some as young as 5.

Now I take my training very seriously, and don't believe that it should be used as a cheap form of child care or baby sitting. The majority of children that join up are there purely to muck around and maybe learn some Karate along the way. The parents insist they want their child to learn discipline and self defence, yet protest as soon as they are given push ups for acting out of line.

I do realise that they are children and not adults lol But maybe the dojo isn't the place for after school sports? Perhaps sign them up for footy?

Your thoughts?

Osu.

The problem may not be the 5 year old children learning karate, but a lack of understanding of how they should be managed. Far better ways to keep children interested than giving them push ups.

Good point, kids are kids and respond better to positive encouragement than negative discipline. These kids have barely started school, can't treat them the same as adults and teach them in the same way.

theJCism, don't know if you have any opportunity to teach the kids, but there are some great threads and posts kicking about in the Instructor Central part of the forum on how to teach MA to kids. Like this post by Jeffery which is great: http://www.karateforums.com/teaching-kids-vt40325.html

[Liver Punch]

I think the positive aspect for teaching kids is that you've got like-minded people to train with when they get older. I was lucky enough to train at our dojo when we had children's classes, and it was great. You always knew that when the adult classes thinned out, you could bring up people from the younger classes who were stylistically and physically ready.

If whoever runs your dojo is looking to do martial arts full-time, it's a huge moneymaker. If you look at a magazine like masuccess, you'll see schools that are teaching 3000 students with after-school care and the whole like. They're becoming very, very rich because of programs like this.

The tradeoff, of course is that little kids are a bit of a pain. Teaching kids wouldn't be my first or second pick, but having those classes is both a good way for younger instructors and lower ranks to start teaching. If you can avoid the children that inherently come with a children's class...it's win/win.