Rock climbing is a wonderful way to keep life in perspective. For kids, it can give them the tools to succeed later in life, both mentally and physically.
It naturally teaches children how to rest, how to set boundaries, and how to handle emotions. In fact, climbing is beneficial to everyone in your family. For busy moms and dads, it can help reprioritize and balance your life.
Let’s take a look at the first skill that climbing promotes.
1) Needing to rest
We live in an age where there is so much to do, explore, fix, learn and enjoy that a lot of us almost feel guilty for taking a break or slowing down.
We are even encouraged to pack in our productivity with all the amazing technology and new-fangled devices we have access to these days.
Kids especially seem to be allergic to boredom and rarely want the fun to end. It’s hard to just turn off. But climbing teaches us that at some point, no matter how much you want to keep going, your body will just say no.
We’re human, we need rest.
Maybe rest doesn’t mean ‘do nothing’. Maybe rest means giving your muscles a break but strategize for your next attempt, discuss your ideas with your coach, or watch a peer try the same climb.
Rest is important and we pretty much have to teach ourselves how to do it these days.
Which leads us to our next skill.
2) Setting boundaries
Everyone has limits and if we don’t recognize our own, we end up getting burned out.
Limits aren’t always just a mark where something ends. Limits are also how fast we go, how much we do, and what we are open to trying at a particular moment.
All climbers learn to recognize and respect their own limitations and set healthy boundaries for themselves. In fact, knowing your limits and respecting them is one of the best ways to keep yourself safe in this sport.
Recognizing also when it’s time to push our limits and when it’s time to back off is an art form that requires guidance, discipline, patience, and tenacity.
You don’t necessarily have to already have these traits to start climbing, but if you’re working with a coach or a guide, you can learn to grow and nurture these qualities pretty effectively and efficiently through the sport of rock climbing.
And the final skill which can be the most difficult to teach is how to handle our emotions.
3) Experiencing strong emotions
Most people can’t get through life without experiencing overwhelmingly strong emotions at one point or another.
Anger, fear, disappointment, bliss, etc. The list is long. But we can’t let our emotions run amuck.
As we grow, we learn to tune into how we are feeling and then rationalize our way through them to make some sense of it all. The latter part is certainly more difficult for most.
Climbing can bring on strong and powerful emotions. The fear of danger can be paralyzing at first for many when your mind and body decide it’s just not very natural to be off the ground, but your rational brain can recall all the important steps you took before starting your climb to mitigate risk and avoid an accident.
The feeling of failure can be so disappointing for some that it can either keep you from trying again or with a bit of a mindset shift, it can propel you forward, reaching higher and pushing harder the next time.
Success can be so blissful it can become intoxicating and dangerous. Learning to reel in that emotion and maintain joy and humility at the same time keeps climbers level-headed and can help to avoid unfortunate and avoidable mistakes in the future.
These are just a few benefits of getting your kid into rock climbing. Of course, there are many more benefits, and this article highlighted those that are often missed but can be just as important. Helping your child learn how to take breaks, set healthy boundaries, and deal with strong emotions such as success as well as failure, can lead to positive outcomes throughout their learning years and well into adulthood.
