Thanks COVID, I'm an instructor now! Need tips for 7 y/o

[Mountain Relish]

There are some great suggestions here from some very experienced people, so you may already be set, but I thought that I would offer up a couple of the things that I have learnt over my 20 years as a ski instructor and with 2 similarly aged children myself.

As lots of people have said it needs to be fun, so the challenge is to take tasks and make them into games. Something I quite often use with children is that you set them a task, and if they do it successfully they get points, and you get points if they do not listen or try properly. You can obviously make it as fun and silly as you want, as long as you don’t become too competitive.

Some of the tasks I use are things like shuffling (great for narrowing stance), stepping, following your line, lifting the inside ski and jumping. You could also do things like holding poles, or balancing them on the backs of hands, if you wanted to work on hand carriage.

What is great about a lot of these is that they can be adapted to different levels quite easily. For example with lifting the inside ski I would always start by tapping the uphill ski between the turns, then a slow tap (more focus on holding the balance), then lift and hold, then lift through the end of the turn, then try the whole turn. This is great for balancing on the outside ski, but also if you make sure that only the tail of the ski is lifted (as in the tip stays on the snow) it can work really well for fore-aft balance.

Line can make a big difference, so focusing on making smooth s-shaped turns, and not z-shaped turns is great. This is where following you can be really helpful, though you may need to tweak your normal line so that it works for somebody much smaller who is on much smaller skis.

I would also say that I would rather see somebody ski with a wedge well than see them ski parallel badly, so I would tend to focus on balance, posture, and how he steers the ski, rather than whether his skis are parallel. That said if he has a really wide stance it can be a sign that he is not as balanced on the outside ski as he could be, but again I would focus on the balance not on the stance width as that will probably fix both anyway.

On the subject of poles I think that they can be quite useful, and it also makes them feel a bit more like a proper skier (I know that for both of our children the poles became more important than actually going skiing). That said I would base it a little bit on what is easiest for you. If you give him poles before he is used to looking after all of his kit it can just become another thing to drop and trip over, but if he is fairly used to the whole process then it is much easier.

Finally as lots of people have said enjoy it, and be patient even when he doesn’t listen to you. Much easier said than done, but it is probably one of the most important things to get right so that the whole experience is a positive one for him.

Good luck.

[ill-advised strategy]

For littles, it’s just about being there, zooming and playing, gaining comfort.

As they develop, if there’s a technique issue keeping them from doing what they want to do, they’ll find it through exploration. For me, it was ice bumps. I saw people skiing ice bumps, went to that run and it destroyed me. So I had a reason to start watching and learning how to do that.
Then it was racing, everyone was racing, so I tried racing...my mogul style was slow, so I had a reason to start watching and learning how to do that.

I think your role as a parent is sensitivity and awareness of what your kid is naturally into on skis, find opportunities to follow that interest. When the kid’s interest turns toward doing something they don’t have the technique for, then you start coaching technique, mindful of tying the coaching to the kid’s goals.

It could be all kinds of forms...support the exploration that drives a need to improve, focus improvement on what they want to explore.

[sk8rat6587]

Awesome advice in here. Sounds very similar to my 7 y/o. Skis very well in the trees, but will sometimes ski with a wide stance and some wedge turns on open terrain. Taking notes for sure.

Sent from my Pixel 4 using Tapatalk