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by Doug Gillett
After years as a martial-arts instructor, Scott Higginbotham usually can tell when they might not be right for a kid. “Not too long ago, a boy came in with his dad, and I was describing to them the classes and the kinds of things we focus on,” says the owner of Higginbotham’s Martial Arts in north Columbus. “After a while, the kid said, ‘You mean it’s not about beating people up?’ I could tell that maybe this wasn’t quite what he thought it was going to be."
No, a reputable martial-arts instructor won’t teach your children how to become the whirling, punching, kicking terrors of their school hallways. What your child might learn—in addition to a precise, sometimes even artistic, physical skill—is focus, patience and the willingness to work consistently over a period of time toward a specific goal.
First things first: Martial-arts classes aren’t daycare. They won’t instantly teach an unruly child to behave, just as they won’t turn Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid into Bruce Lee overnight. Parents with reasonable expectations, however, can enroll even kids as young as 4 or 5 in the hopes that they will get some exercise and begin learning basic skills.
Those 4- and 5-year-olds comprise the youngest age group at Higginbotham’s school. “We start out just teaching basic muscle movements — they don’t have a lot of fine-tuned control yet,” he explains. “We also teach them about strangers and how to respond to them.”
In the next group, ages 6 to 13, Higginbotham begins teaching more complex moves and working toward specific skill sets. Their class sessions end not with fighting, but with words. Higginbotham chooses one of the words he’s adopted as a central tenet of his martial-arts teaching, such as “honor,” “respect” or “persistence,” and discusses it with his students. “We discuss that particular tenet, and after they’ve learned the meaning of the word, they tell stories from their own lives about their experiences with it, and then I tell them some of my stories as well,” he says.
The point is to impart an understanding that the martial arts are about more than just kicking and punching, or even self-defense. It’s about putting in the time and energy, both mental and physical, necessary to learning a complex new skill. The message has gotten through to 8-year-old Christopher Chai, who started taking taekwondo at Higginbotham’s academy when he was just 5.
“I wanted to see if I could go stronger and get the black belt,” Christopher says of his initial motivation to begin taking classes. His favorite part is “learning new moves. I just learned the jump spin side kick.” It wasn’t easy, though. He says that one move “took a few months” to learn. But he stuck with it and has already achieved the rank of senior blue belt.
That kind of persistence, and the courage to keep trying, is one of the most important things any child can get out of martial-arts training, Higginbotham says. “We try to take a lot of the fear of failure out of them,” he explains. “A lot of kids come in here and they’re afraid to give it their all, but what we try to teach them is, if you don’t get it right the first time, you get another chance. If you can’t do it the first time, get back up and we’ll try it again.”
Christopher’s experience with taekwondo was so positive that his mother, Anneliese, a physician’s assistant in Columbus, decided to take lessons herself after a few months of observing her son’s progress.
“It was exciting to watch it, but I realized
I really wanted to do it. I just
thought it sounded like a neat way to
do exercise,” she says. She confesses to
being nervous when she first started. “I
had just turned 40. I thought, ‘I don’t
know if I can do this,’” she recalls, laughing.
But her increased physical fitness
and body confidence, not to mention
newfound “personal strength” and perseverance,
became apparent in a hurry.
Now her entire family is in on the action: Christopher, 6-year-old daughter Savannah, and 18-year-old daughter Kelsey, who is learning both taekwondo and jujitsu. “From a parental perspective, to watch a teenage girl go from that adolescent body awkwardness to holding her own, it’s been really cool watching that, let me tell you,” Anneliese says. “It gives you a deep appreciation for how physical it is. When you actually do it, you realize it’s harder than it looks.
“But it certainly gives us something to bond over as a family,” she continues.“And it’s good for us all to have something in common, instead of everyone having different activities and running around like crazy, never having the same schedule.”
Higginbotham says his adult classes draw just as diverse a crowd as his classes for youngsters. “Adults like it for the friendship and networking angles,” he says, although it’s not unusual for today’s busy, frequently distracted career men and women to get almost as big a benefit in terms of focus and mental fitness as their younger counterparts do.
Still, he says, he gets the most enjoyment out of listening to and interacting with his young students. “You never know what they’re going to say,” he admits with a laugh. “I always tell ‘em I want to see them do three things in each class. I want to see them smile, I want to see them sweat, and I want to see them learn."
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