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There was an incident at the start of the school year involving one of my boys that made me realise how both of them needed to learn some self defense. So, we enrolled them to do karate twice a week.

It has so many benefits. It is more than just fitness or self defense.  I love the teachers of karate here, they are very encouraging to kids and are fine role models for the children. The teachers here are young men and they start a karate lesson each time with a social lesson. Last month it was “Respect” and he talks for 5 mins about ways we show respect to our friends, parents, teachers.  This month, it is about goal setting.  The boys look up to the teachers because they did some really cool things, like break concrete with their elbows and displayed all these super-strength feats.

I tried to enrol James for karate in Singapore with a renowned karate teacher but withdrew him after the first lesson because the “Master” kicked James very hard to punish him when James forgot to call him “Master.” I rang him and voiced my displeasure that such a person like him who was trying to teach children about control lost it over something which was merely a mistake. He was incensed that I challenged his authority in his arena. So different from here.

Aside from that, I was very happy to see that a lot of what we used to do in Occupational Therapy with Cameron is done during karate.  Some OTs recommend karate for children with motor planning delays, dyspraxia and low muscle tone.

So after 3 months of karate, they were ready to move on to their first belt test. The boys made it! They are now officially gold belt.  What is so neat about it is that they have a different test system for kids - makes sense because which child would want to wait a year before progressing to another belt? It has done so much for their motivation and excitement for the sport. They both had to break a board by kicking it.

Here are the boys, flushed and happy with their first achievement. Way to go boys!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Family, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.