to think that encouraging your daughter to learn ballet is cruel

[morningpaper]

Because BASICALLY, ballet is all about body image and is a money-making racket to boot (silly costumes and unecessary shoes).

There just AREN'T curvy ballerinas. You have to have the perfect body - thin, willowy and in perfect proportion. I well remember when my 11 year-old best mate was rejected from the Royal Ballet School because her 'shoulders were too wide'. She cried for weeks. Ballet had been her life.

Basically, they either get sick of it themselves, or they stop because they realise that their BODIES ARE IMPERFECT. Either way, the time could be better used doing some sort of more useful modern dance that you can learn in £1.99 Asda trainers which isn't dependent on having a perfect body.

Please take your daughters to something more useful instead.

greeny, seriously, ballet is sinister???

god, this would be a great thread if I didn;t know how fab ballet makes my girls feel.

first I am cruel and then it is similar to encouragin them to pole dance, and then sisnister.

FFS!!

My dd did ballet for 7 years and really enjoyed it, she liked classical training for the exams (took it up to Grade 4) and loved being in the annual shows - where they mostly performed modern dance. There was a huge variety of shapes and sizes of girls (with a handful of boys). She also enjoyed the social side. We were lucky though - she had a fab teacher who was very professional and made it fun.

I do think though that there comes a time to give it up for the vast majority

It won't be misplaced. I will make sure of that. I am one of the least confident people in the world - painfully shy - but I am happy in my own skin and I will pass that onto my children.

mileniwmffalcon for my DD, how it differs from other forms of dance/sport/exercise...I will give you a few examples.

Horse riding, she cannot balance well and falls off and is scared - despite us having horses and ponies. I am a rider myself, when she was born I pictured us out hacking together on a Saturday morning - not driving for 12 miles to attend a ballet class.

Bike riding, see above.

swimming, despite yrs of weekly lessons her ability remains well behind that of her peers - she does not enjoy it as it is obvious when swimming lengths that she is always last and her class are standing waiting for her.

sport, despite going to a school where she has sport/pe 4 days per week her abilities are limited. It is obvious in sport if you cannot throw, catch, hit a ball with a bat, run as fast, do a forward roll, balance on a bench etc as your peers

In a small ballet class the girls are doing the same thing at the same time, everyone is too busy (peers not teacher) concentrating on what they are doing to notice my DD not getting it right. She feels more confident, less vulnerable she reaps the reward of her hard work - no matter how hard she tries in tennis she cannot hit the ball often, if you practise in your room for hours you will eventually get the steps right.

Having to achieve and maintan a/symmetrical positions is very good for proprioception.

Of course most forms of exercise will strenghten core muscles, but if it exposes one to ridicule (real or otherwise) it will not help ones self esteem.

lol. i laughed at sinister too.

this is actually quite funny for an aibu.

Actually, I think if my dd were better at it, I would be more wary, funnily enough. But she will never be in a position where her entire hopes and dreams centre on ballet. Any more than ds's will centre on football. It's fun. When it stops being fun, she will stop.

edam, my youngest boy wanted to do ballet.

shame of it all was that he was asked to leave, as he decided one day that the pretty ballet barbie feet (yes, that last sentence does kind of feed the barbie belief doesn;t it) needed to be exterminated.............so he became a darlek.

and then asked to elave for scaring the 4yr old girls.

oh the shame, I have never recovered from that experience!!

It's difficult posting on a thread like this though, because the general will always be taken as the particular.

I think it's possible to say that I think ballet for little girls - as a force within society at large - is a bit sinister and I would avoid it like the plague (I feel the same way about gymnastics btw - riddled with abuse) while acknowledging that not every parent whose girls do ballet is an asshole, or that some girls take to it and love it.

A friend who is a teacher says it is all she can do to stop the 14-year-olds dressing up in basques and suspenders when they do their pole dancing for the end of term 'talent' show.

If you apply the criteria you seem to be using to make your "cruel" remark then you need to rule out one hell of a lot of things.

I used to go to ballet from the age of 6 and it helped me a lot. I was born prem and had bad co-ordination well into childhood as a result, I was also a shy and timid child. My mum sent me every Saturday, as well as tap and modern dance and within a few weeks my co-ordination was vastly improved and I was a much more confident child as a result. I also loved the yearly shows we did. It was fun. What a terrible mother she was to me, eh?

I'm sorry but your OP is absurd. Dancing can be a fun hobby. When I was sent dancing body image had nothing to do with it. Perhaps she should have let me sit in front of the box with a cheeseburger at weekends then! That would have been far better I'm sure.

Wicked parents encouraging their children to do things they are good at and enjoy.

"I dislike women being things that are looked"

my ds wants to be an actor- not surprisingly as two of dh's grandparents and his grandma were on the stage

should I tell him that that's ok because he's a boy, but that a woman shouldn't be reduced to something that is looked at? should I tell dd she can't go to stage school (if we can find the money) because she's a girl, but he may?

dd's natural way of expressing her emotion has always been to dance them, she was devastated when disability got in the way, because it was like her speech being curtailed

it's not about being a pretty figure in a plastic box unless that is what you make of it

looking at various cultures worldwide, dance as a way of telling a story does appear to have very ancient roots

it's about finding a ballet school which is about inclusion and stage training, not about body image

for us, the socialisation and participation aspect have been some of the greatest things about ballet (but I would never dream of forbidding my dcs to play the piano simply because it is about solo performance)

yuck yuck smallorange!

So I'll stick with DD1's music and movement class - which is ballet but has no uniform and a fair scattering of boys too.

Oh I forgot to say, a boy at dd's school - not ballet school, dd doesn't do ballet anymore - won a scholarship last year to White Lodge the Junior Royal Ballet school.

is it still crap if its a boy morningpaper

Yes pole dancing enthusiastically supported by the parents. Makes ballet seem rather tame, doesn't it

I think the culture of ballet is bloody awful to be honest, so yes I think it's crap for anyone, but particularly crap for girls because aspiriring to be a pink fluffy thin wafty thing is not great imo

I went to school with a boy ballet dancer who went to the RBS

He is now an accountant

Do boys get rejected from ballet school for not being big enough in the pant department? Or do they get given a prosthesis if they fall short?

DD went once when she was 4 and she only wanted to leap off the stage and be a bee when the others were flowers and we were encouraged not to return.

I asked if I could go when I was little and my mother laughed and said they wouldn't have me as I had the grace of an elephant. I think she probably couldn't afford it. I still have it in my brain that I have the grace of an elephant and I didn't even make it to the bloody classes.

edam on Thu 16-Apr-09 14:52:01

"I'm v. glad I have a boy so don't have all this faff"

ah, it never does to be too sure, my dear

I too have a boy

smallorange. guessing your dd is pre-school then. so are you going to choose stagecoach or ballet when she grows out of the music and movement? or will that be when she has to stop even if she enjoys it?

i'm totally against pole dancing btw - can't find a single thing i approve of there...

actually pole dancing doesn't seem THAT bad, I mean it is more like circus skills really isn't it?

lol, my mother used to say something similar about Irish dancing, along the lines of "There's something bloody weird about a form of dance which consists of young girls kicking their feet and legs around with their arms held rigidly by their sides"

and I see her point

lol greensleeves!

mm, skanky boy leotard... they are always at the bottom of the laundry basket...