Do your children love to slide? In winter it might be on mud or ice. In this weather you might put down a length of polythene outside with a little water on it and they can slip-slide the length of it.
So what’s so attractive about sliding? Two things.
Once perfected so that it feels safe, sliding creates maximum movement and power with minimum effort. And our body-brans reward us with good feelings when we create safe, efficient, powerful movement with minimum effort. It’s a life skill. Good developmental work.
Sliding also allows a body to experience, and practise, stability-in-motion and that’s a skill at the core of efficient movement, but it also resonates way beyond a simple physical activity. Feeling stable as things shift and move around us has an emotional component as well as a physical one.
So watch again as your children slide, notice the amazing commitment they often make to it and the immense pleasure it offers them and reflect on what a great life skill is building here: stability-in-motion.
And as you head off on your holidays notice the ways you too might check in with this. Perhaps you will go paddle boarding or water skiing? Or fly down a helter skelter at a theme park? Go roller skating; or just get on your a bike and cycle somewhere. Often, on holiday, we create opportunities to play more … and in so doing we practice and maintain our bodies in very helpful ways that everyday adult life can sideline.
Or perhaps you will go somewhere you have never been before, putting yourself out of your immediate comfort zone, and you will need to manage an emotional kind of stability-in-motion.
Many of our children will be moving on to school after the summer, or going to a new playgroup or nursery.
A summer of sliding - and all the ways they find to practise stability-in-motion - is great preparation.