Taekwondo as a Parent – Week 3
Our do-jang has a lot of belts — I guess it keeps the attendees engaged and promotes gamification. There’s also a subsystem, where you get a colored tape on your belt for every five sessions you attend.
My son and I just received our first yellow tape on our white belts. Yay us. It’s a good motivator for the kiddos, and I’m guessing it serves a couple other purposes. You’re required to do at least thirty classes before you can test for a belt, and the tape seems like a good immediate visual indicator to instructors about readiness to test.
There was backsliding for both of us this week. I lost some of the internal confidence I had, as I started overthinking everything. I also realized that the early stages of taekwondo are like 90% muscle memory.
My son also decided that his kids-only session would be a good opportunity to clown around. He saw an older kid with zero discipline not taking the class seriously, and he decided to mirror the behavior. He eventually shaped up when he and the older kid were separated, but it was not pleasing to see.
I also found out this week that a friend also goes to the same do-jang. There was a mask requirement up until last week, so most attendees were unrecognizable in these large groups. Once the masks came off, we suddenly noticed each other. I also found out his son attended with him (same as me) until he got his yellow belt and then he suddenly quit. A quick informal survey of some other parents revealed the same exact thing: for young kids, yellow belt was a natural jumping-off point.
This week, I’ve really been having some problems with two things:
- Getting a sense of exactly how many moving attacks there are at the beginning. The slightly different stances combined with the theoretically similar number of attack moves is throwing me off.
- As you prepare to execute a movement, your hands come together with the tops of your hands facing each other. I get that there’s probably a point to it, but it is the most unnatural feeling in the world.
My son seems to be catching on to the muscle memory stuff more quickly than I am. I suspect it’s a matter of age. He was very quick to pick up skateboarding, even at age 5. I think it’s the lack of over processing things that makes the absorption of things easier.
