Break the rules

Caroline Kings, co-founder of We Are Girls in Sport, looks at how we can harness the power of children’s imaginations and curiosity to explain how sports can be fun but why they also need rules.

Let’s face it, one of the great things about children is their fertile imaginations and the fact that they’re still learning – they’re uninhibited by rules. Children can create fun games in any situation, with or without toys. And because they don’t know how things should be done, they make it up as they go along (appreciate that also applies to, say, dining out or showing their new baby sister ‘love’, but bear with me).

For children to be active and to want to move their little bodies, firstly, they have to enjoy it. We know that children love running, climbing, skipping, jumping, hopping, splashing and so on, which means we know that they can have fun exercising – even if they don’t see it as exercise as we do.

The problems can start when we introduce rules and try to teach them the ‘right way’ to do it. Then exercise becomes like school or a lesson and, for some, the fun just drains away. But what about if we approached it differently? Here’s an example – let’s take a simple running race. You have a group of children at the park, a group of friends, and you nonchalantly tell them to have a race. Some children will just run without thinking. Some children will stop and ask where to start and where the finish line is. Some children will ask whether it can be a jumping race. And so on. The children are excited and their minds are coming up with some great questions.

Cue conversations with the children about what kind of race would they like – running, hopping, freestyle? Should the race be fair? How would they suggest it’s made fair, what needs to happen? The children are engaged in their exercise and they’ll start to learn that sporting competitions need a framework. Can one child trip up another child? No, so there need to be rules – let’s come up with the rules together. This may not all happen in one trip to the park, but it teaches the children how sport works.

You can apply this approach to other sports (as long as it’s safe!). Tennis – maybe they want to hit the ball with the racquet handle rather than its head – who cares? They’ll realise that it works better the other way around eventually, just as they’ll realise that if you want to play competitively, you need to stick to the rules of the tennis court and the game itself.

‘Should a player have endless chances to serve in the opposite box?’ ‘No, that’s annoying and boring for me.’ ‘OK, shall we limit it to a certain number?’ Let them have fun trying it every way they want. Importantly, they’re being active their way and that helps with ongoing engagement.

The approach must be safe – a swimming pool is perhaps not the best place for a free for all, for example, but children can still learn about the strokes, what works and what doesn’t and again, how a swimming race might work.

Finally, let’s remember that any way that we move our bodies is good for our physical and mental health. If a child’s way of being active is not ‘typical’ but it’s safe, then it must be encouraged. You never know, they could be the first athlete in a brand-new sport.

We Are Girls in Sport (wearegirlsinsport.

com) is a global movement for showcasing girls in sport while helping them find a sport they enjoy and want to pursue.