Ballet proves to be a type of dance that is highly beneficial for children. The style of ballet has built the fundamentals of dance, making it a great transition into other forms of dance. While ballet lends tremendously in other forms of dance, it is proven to help in everyday life as well. Ballet not only provides physical benefits, but social, emotional, and educational benefits for children who participate in a dance class.
Ballet can be physically intense and has many benefits that can be gained during your child’s weekly dance class. Ballet is a combination of Pilates and endurance training and helps kids to build strength. It also focuses on both fine and gross motor skills to provide a more coordinated child. The amount of body awareness and discipline that is required in ballet can also give children heightened postural awareness. The movements and technique use both static and dynamic stretching. Static stretches are intended to be held in a challenging but comfortable position while dynamic stretches are both challenging and repetitive. The combination of dynamic stretching to prepare the joints for movement and static stretching to increase tissue flexibility gives children more overall flexibility. In the end, children enrolled in a ballet class are more physically fit and create a lifetime awareness of their body and posture.
While ballet is easily seen as an individual sport, it is highly social. Teamwork, communication, and trust and cooperation are all highly encouraged and necessary in ballet. When dancing with others no one looks good unless everyone looks good, so it fosters a way for children to work together and help each other to improve everyone in the class. 95% of communication is non-verbal communication with 55% of that communication being body language. Ballet teaches body awareness and postural awareness that will carry over in everyday non-verbal communication. Along with being able to effectively communicate with others and work together, children are then in turn having to learn to trust and cooperate with others. Overall, giving your child more confidence to interact with the world around them.
In addition to mastering technique in ballet, children will become more confident, self-aware, and find ways to escape stress. In ballet children are challenged with difficult combinations that take time and work to be able to accurately complete them. This gives children a sense of pride and accomplishment when they see their hard work pay off in such a way that a once difficult combination becomes easy. Leading them to be more self-assured children. This boosted sense of pride and accomplishment leads to more self-esteem. Self-esteem is a trait that is highly encouraged in kids that take ballet by acknowledging their accomplishments and encouraging them to celebrate being able to preform a skill that they didn’t think was possible. Ballet is about children having fun and training their body to achieve skills they didn’t know were possible before. This helps to provide an escape from external life issues and give them a space to decompress. So, while kids work hard in ballet, their hard work lends to them being more confident and accomplished.
You may not have thought that enrolling your child in a ballet class would in turn link to them becoming a better student. Children learn the best through experience, as it is what comes the most natural. The basis of kinesthetic learning is to learn by “doing” and to act on knowledge. Ballet helps to bridge the gap in kinesthetic learning with understanding. Within ballet kids are presented with movement ideas or problems that in turn can be solved with a movement response. This creates a cognitive loop between the idea, problem, or intent and the outcome or solution. Ballet also requires a vast amount of discipline, both in your body and in a child’s ability to listen to what is being asked of them. In turn, creating a more well-rounded student who can use their experiences in ballet in the classroom.
Overall ballet has many benefits for children, making it a great fundamental dance class for kids to take. It provides physical, social, emotional, and educational benefits, making for a more well-rounded child.