Reply to Ballet, hip hop, Irish dance, cheer & pom, acrob

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]None of the above.  Put her in tennis and/or swim so she can develop skills and a love of a sport she can continue with in high school and all through adulthood [/quote]

My kid swims and dances. They are very complimentary disciplines. She tried a bunch of different stuff when she was in early elementary and those are the two she loved the most. I tried to get her into tennis because I love it, but it's just not her thing. She might give it another shot in middle school.

There's a lot about dance that is just generally beneficial as well as useful in other sports. You learn a lot about music and it can be a beneficial practice to playing an instrument because of what you learn about pace and quality of the music. Ballet as a discipline trains you to isolate and develop muscle groups and then put them together in increasingly more complex movement -- the body awareness and understanding of how power is transferred in jumps and turns translates into a lot of athletic disciplines (I danced as a child and picked up tennis as an adult -- my coach always compliment me on my balance and footwork). Dancing with others teaches spatial awareness and synchronization, which are fairly advanced athletic skills.

To OP, I'd say that 7 is a good age to sample a variety of different styles of dance and see what she likes. If she really enjoys dancing, I would enroll her in ballet because it's foundational and will help her in all other dance disciplines. Another thing to think about is if she wants to focus on competition or not. My daughter doesn't do competitive dance, she trains at a ballet studio and performs in recitals twice a year. She likes class and learning longer performance pieces over a longer period, and she is not interested in head to head competition in dance (she gets that in swimming, dance is a bit of a refuge from that competition). But some kids like the competition aspect and like learning the shorter competition pieces and like the focus on learning specific tricks that is more common on competition teams. Competition dance often requires a major time commitment though (and is pricy) so take that into consideration.

Lots of non-white, non-Irish kids do Irish dance, btw. It's a very competition-focused discipline, and they tend to do a lot of exhibitions, so it's good for a kid who really likes performing. But it doesn't transfer as well to other styles and is kind of its own thing, so I'd only do it if your kid just loves it. Otherwise I'd stick with more transferable styles like ballet, jazz, or acro.[/quote]

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