Practicing sports has multiple benefits for children, but sometimes they are not encouraged to try physical exercise. Today, our sports activities coordinator, Carlos Carretero, gives us some guidelines and tips to motivate children to do sports.
The key is the motivation to find a physical activity that appeals to them enough to start practicing it, because once they try it, they are hooked. Why does this happen? Exercise causes the body to produce endorphins -the happiness hormones-, and depending on the sport also adrenaline, serotonin, cortisol or dopamine. As a result, a feeling of physical and mental well-being is produced, which everyone who experiences it wants to repeat.
Guidelines to motivate your children to practice sports
The basis of children's education begins at home, with the family, so "it is essential that sports are part of their lives from an early age," explains Carlos Carretero, coordinator of sports activities at Logos Nursery School, anursery schoolin Las Rozas de Madrid.
- Set an example. At this age, kids learn a lot by repetition. That is to say, if they see their parents practicing sports and enjoying it, they will want to imitate them and will begin to develop a habit as healthy as exercising.
- Make sure they have access to balls, a bike, a rope, etc. at home. So that fun is not only focused on being in front of a screen, but that they have various options to lead an active life at home as well.
- Let them choose the sport they like best. A fundamental step in motivation is to give them the power to choose, since forcing can have an adverse effect and make them feel rejection towards the activity chosen by their parents.
- Fun is above competitiveness. Teach them to outdo themselves, not others, to encourage healthy competition in sports.
- And, of course, you don't have to stick to one discipline. If you like several sports, go ahead.
Motivating children to play sports at school
Physical Education teachers encounter all kinds of cases in their classes. Carlos Carretero says that "there are children who come to this subject with great enthusiasm, which is a mental break for them during the school day, and others who, on the contrary, are insecure and have little motivation for sports activities".
For this reason, in our school we offer a large number of sports disciplines to our students, so that their beginnings in sports are positive and motivated. In the older school -LogosInternational School-in addition to the weekly sports plan of the Physical Education subject, once a week they do a sports activity of their own choice within the school timetable.
Sports help children to stay healthy, to develop physically and mentally and to relate in a healthy way with their peers. Thus, at Logos Nursery School, sports education is as important as scientific-cultural education and human, spiritual and civic development.
