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Full disclosure: I don’t teach that many kids right now, partially because I have a pair of hooligans and a third on the way.  I regularly deal with my three year old making statements like “I am the bad guy that doesn’t wear clothes” as he runs down the hall naked.  My five year old has set a record for questions in a five-minute period, which he regularly tries to best.  So I have my quota of curtain climbers to deal with.

And quite frankly, kids are tough to teach.  Part of it is that they are boundless balls of energy, with little focus.  As a physicist I swear the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was developed by watching five year olds.  The fact that they often need to be shown a technique twenty times to get it, yet have an attention span of only a few minutes is only a portion of the issue.  Eventually they do pick it up, and they do learn to focus at least in spurts, so maintaining patience while running a highly dynamic class is absolutely key to working with them.

Another one of the issues is that I don’t think kids are as physically or mentally tough as they were twenty-five years ago.  There is much research on the Millenial Generation (ne 1980-2000) that validates that they are more pampered than previous ones and have been raised on the couch by computer games instead of being kicked out of the house at eight in the morning and being told “Don’t come back ‘til lunch unless you’re bleeding.”  The constant bombardment of information and entertainment has compounded the attention span issue while making it more difficult to push the kids to develop because the thresholds have been lowered.  For too many of the kids coming into the class they are over-programmed and over-stressed way too early in life, yet do not get the chance to just run and play as they should, so having a looser structure compared to older students is necessary for pre-teens.  Having fun in class is something that was totally out of my mindset until I started working with kids.  An advantage of this though is that you can use the fun as leverage to make sure they don’t use their knowledge outside of the dojo and that they work hard in school or else they aren’t allowed to come to class.

Now you might get some blowback from parents if you require the kids to show you their grades or discipline them in class.  Quite honestly, that is the hardest part of teaching kids: the parents.  Unless the parents have trained in the martial arts also, they need to be 100% on board with it being YOUR class and you are the ultimate authority (within legal limits) or else they can not be watching class and maybe shouldn’t even have their kids there.  Outside of the family we are often the first true authority figure that these kids encounter, and so it is critical for their development as members of a functional society as well as martial artists to learn to learn and obey, to accept criticism and praise so that they can emotionally and physically grow.  Too many parents are still bubble wrapping their kids in an attempt to protect them instead of preparing them for the real world.  I actually had a parent complain a few years ago that I made their kid sweat.  The kid was a teenager!  I probably shouldn’t have responded with “When I was his age we bled”, but I did because I wanted to get the message across about what I expected out of the students for their success.  Managing the expectations of the parents makes it easier to coach the children.

It is tough to teach the half pints because of all the things that go with being a kid, especially if you are used to teaching adults as I was and really am.  But when someone you taught at eight comes back after college graduation and thanks you for showing them the right way, then all the craziness is worth it.