As a parent, helping your child develop healthy habits and grow strong is your top priority. Children need hobbies that encourage creativity, physical activity, team work, and an interesting challenge. For these reasons, dance is the perfect activity for children of all ages. Here are just a few ways taking dance classes could help your child as he or she develops.

Dancing Reduces Accident Risk

Every child is going to have a few scrapes and falls as they grow up, that's unavoidable. However, nurturing a sense of balance and spatial awareness could help your child avoid taking too many unnecessary tumbles. It can also reduce a child's fear of engaging in active play.

Taking part in aerobic exercise has been shown to strengthen the cerebellum, a part of the brain responsible for, among other things, your sense of balance and your awareness of where you are in space. The longer you avoid aerobic or balance-based activities, the more likely this area is to atrophy, reducing your spatial awareness and sense of balance. So a child who is afraid of play and spends all of his or her time with sedentary pursuits could easily develop poor balance and coordination.

Children who take part in dance, on the other hand, tend not to get dizzy as easily and have much better balance. As a result, they get hurt less due to clumsiness or misjudging their surroundings. Being aware of the body and its position also tends to make kids safer when they take part in competitive sports or dance, since it reduces the likelihood of painful missteps and unintentional collisions with other kids.

You Can Stave Of Childhood Obesity With Dance

A little over 1 in 4 Canadian children is either overweight or obese, and the numbers continue to rise. Unfortunately, children who are overweight and obese also tend to gain weight as they age, not lose it, which means if nothing is done they will go on to be more and more unhealthy. Risks from childhood obesity include a lifelong unhealthy relationship with food, risk of heart disease, risk of diabetes, a and statistically shorter lifespan overall.

While diet is a big part of how much you weigh, exercise is the other side of the same coin. If you want your child to maintain healthy habits you have to get them invested in exercise at an early age. This can be difficult, since children can easily get bored with traditional exercises, but that's what makes dance such a perfect solution. Dancing is very effective at calorie burning, but also engaging and fun. Teaching children dancing will also teach them that exercise can be enjoyable.

Learning Dance Nurtures Creativity

Young children often lack the tools for expressing themselves creatively. They don't know very many words and lack the fine motor skills required for creating fine visual art. However, one language that most children speak well is the language of movement. Kids are often running, jumping, and climbing before they can even write a paragraph, which means you can train them to harness their creativity through motion before they're able to otherwise express it.

Children as young as 3 can attend dance classes, though they won't learn any formal moves. Instead, they're taught the principles of rhythm and creative motion, working with others to express themselves artistically, and overcoming the fear of performing for others.

If you want to give your kid a good head start when it comes to artistic expression, healthy habits, and accident avoidance, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better hobby than dancing. Even if your kid doesn't grow up to be a professional dancer, they'll have a stronger physical and mental foundation for whatever interests they choose to pursue. Contact some local dance studios for more information.