5 Amazing Life Lessons that Ballet Teaches Children

If your child is enrolled in ballet lessons, you’re already well aware of the wonder, excitement, and physical benefits that dance brings to children.

But you’ll be even happier to know that by supporting your child’s exploration of dance, you are setting the stage for success in other areas of their life.

In fact, research has shown that dance teaches children important life skills. The skills that children learn at a young age are carried with them into adulthood – and the arts are particularly important in the formative years of their life.

Here are our favourite 5 life lessons that ballet teaches children:

1. Self-confidence - Perhaps the most important life and beautiful skill is self-confidence. Every parent wants their child to grow up happy, healthy, and with a strong sense of self-respect. Ballet helps children form a positive opinion of themselves – and deepens their sense of self-worth – by providing opportunities to practice skills, accomplish goals, receive encouragement and praise, and develop respect for their body.
2. Listening skills - While we may all have an innate sense of rhythm, ballet isn’t something that can be learned overnight. It takes coaching, practicing, and experimenting. To develop skills as a ballet dancer, children are required to listen carefully to instructions. This builds a sense of respect for authority and partners, and fosters children’s ability to pay close attention to detail.
3. How to take turns - Dancing is not only about the self-mastery of skills, it is about teamwork. By enrolling children in dance lessons from a young age, you are giving them a head start in developing social skills that allow them to work well with others. By taking turns in class, and on the stage, they learn about respect for others and how to be part of a community.
4. Self-discipline - Self-discipline is critical to advancing as a ballet dancer. Reaching one’s full potential isn’t just about talent, it’s also about perseverance, practice, and commitment. Ballet can help develop these skills by demonstrating to children the wonderful things that can happen when they practice, practice, practice.
5. Self-awareness - After years of coaching children in ballet, something that we notice most profoundly at Ballet Coaching is their development of self-awareness. Self-awareness means everything from the way children hold their posture inside and outside of the studio, to the reflexivity they show when working with others. Ballet is a wonderful way to get your child in touch with their body, mind, and soul.

Here at Ballet Coaching we are proud of the positive impacts we make on the children that enter our studio. We see our role as not only developing beautiful dancers, but preparing children for the rest of their lives.