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Our Philosophy
To develop a child’s self-esteem by providing success experiences in a non-competitive environment. Since it is the nature of competition to produce more losers than winners, and young children can’t distinguish “losing” from “being a loser,” we define winning as “personal best” instead of better than others. We believe that every student should be made to feel like a winner.
Our non-competitive approach to teaching gymnastics makes us unique. Young children exposed to losing tend to anticipate failure and shy away from contests. The few young competitors that do win often develop conditional self-esteem. When the self-esteem fluctuates based on performance, the child goes through tremendous emotional turmoil.
With healthy self-esteem, we can more easily perceive our mistakes as lessons instead of failures. When learning skills, if a child experiences success, after success, after success, the child will learn to expect success.
We call this expectation of success “confidence.” With confidence, a child will try longer and harder than without it, thereby continuing the cycle of success. The results are obvious to everyone – a belief in oneself that carries over into life outside the gym.
By removing the contest from the activity, the child is free to enjoy learning without the risk, or fear of being judged. This allows them to give their best effort unrestrained. Removing contests includes avoiding statements like “who can be the first to line up?” or “Who can do the most push-ups?”
While we all want our children to learn values of fair play, courtesy, and good sportsmanship, research now tells us that competitive sport often encourages and rewards the opposite. And while many of us have had valuable and successful sport experiences in our youth, it is far more common for children to want to avoid the failure involved with contest focused activities. This is witnessed in our societies many low self-esteem related cultural ills and today’s youth fitness crisis.
We must never compare one child’s abilities or accomplishments to those of another child. We only compare a child’s performance to their previous performance.
