I don’t have a preteen yet, my daughter is just 6. But we had a tweenager/pre-teen living across the street and a couple of our friends have eleven and twelve year olds respectively. Sometime between elementary school where my daughter is now and middle school where their kids are – exercise and playtime becomes seriously not cool.
For example, my daughter has two full recesses a day in elementary school: thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon. She also enjoys 50 minutes of physical education twice every six days. In middle school, there’s about fifteen minutes after lunch and their physical education classes and that’s it. Where my daughter enjoys running around and playing crazily, the pre-teens don’t.
When presented with their options, they’d rather go to the mall to shop or hang out in front of their Playstation 3 or better yet, talking on their cell phones to all their friends. At one point last summer, I saw my neighbor’s daughter sitting outside in a pair of roller blades staring glumly at the lawn. I asked her what was wrong and she sighed. She had to spend thirty minutes blading, riding her bicycle or some other physical activity – if she didn’t do it, she had to go to the gym with her mom when her mom got home.
I did my best not to laugh, but she honestly portrayed this as a fate worse than death. She hated exercising and she hated getting hot and sweaty. But she got up after a few minutes, squared her shoulders and started roller blading down the long weaving sidewalk. She took off every chance she got to escape this 30-minute assignment, but more than once she got busted and ended up going to the gym with her mom.
The trick of it is to make exercise cool. Now, for most of us adults, people who exercise are cool because they are physically active, often in good shape and looking fit and well. But our pre-teens don’t care about that so much, they care more about enjoying themselves than working their butts off in hot and sweaty exercise.
You need to make it fun and you need to let your pre-teen discover what they enjoy and you need to make a point of enjoying it with them. For example, maybe your son enjoys rock climbing so take him rock climbing and go together. Maybe your daughter prefers to swim and take advantage of a gym membership to get both of you into the pool together. You can head out as a family or as just parent and child to cycle together and more.
Don’t ask them for more than 30 minutes of their time at first and focus more on enjoying that time together than on performing cardio or weight training – 30 minutes of activity is 30 minutes of activity. As for that cool factor, check with your kids. They may want you to dress a certain way or do their exercise in a way that doesn’t embarrass them. If you’re pre-teen has a best friend that they want to do the exercise with, encourage that – you can go along to chaperone, but you can let them do their own thing I their own way.
If you are running out of ideas or are stumped, consider that the schools, churches and many community centers offer options for everything from teen sports to walking clubs. They work very well at helping you to get your pre-teen get active, social and more. I know one mom who volunteers with her pre-teen every weekend to help repair or build homes for people who need them. It’s a grueling bit of work, but they both enjoy it and the pre-teen is getting a lot of activity combined with social and moral responsibility.
How do you get your pre-teen to exercise?
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