DS is in Y1. He is a lovely boy who is doing well academically at school (got a fantastic report) and also seems reasonably confident socially. He has plenty of friends and is OK with new people/situations.
But he has always lacked physical confidence. I think part of it is a lack of physical ability/co-ordination, but not all. He has been like this since he was first moving. He didn't crawl and he was ages before he could pull himself up without the furniture. So if he fell over away from furniture he was stuck. Then he learned to crawl and I remember him crawling over to a rug to pull himself up on - this is the lack of confidence in his own abilities bit. At the time I thought it was just funny.
But over the years I have had to show him and persuade him he can do it on various playgrounds etc. He has been having swimming lessons since he was 3 and still can't swim. He won't move forward, take a polystyrene disc off etc, he panics, which affects his swimming, which means he gets given the disc back. He is very reluctant to practice riding his bike - we took the stabilisers off but DH holds the saddle and DD and I come out so she can practice pedalling.
But he absolutely adores football both playing and watching. He is happiest wearing a football strip and kicking a ball about in the garden. His favourite programme is match of the day, his favourite book (he reads and memorises the stats about foreign players and clubs) is the match of the day annual etc. But he is getting a bit big for kicking the ball about in our sloping garden and it is over the fence quite regularly which is OK atm because the owner is rarely there and he is responsible enough to nip round and get it back, but she is putting the house on the market so it will not stay like this. So I decided to enrol him in a local football club under-7s. DH took him last week and he went off and ran around although taking care not to get into any tackling type situations and we thought it was a good start bearing in mind it was pouring down. Anyway the second one was last night and it was a bit of a rush, but DH took him again and he wouldn't join in at all despite a boy he knows quite well (same class, same childminder) being there this week (wasn't last week). We couldn't get out of him what the problem was. DS is trying to claim that they were late, but DH says they weren't (although they were rushing). DH thinks he is scared of the leather ball. I think that he feels more secure just one to one with an obliging adult who is careful to keep the roughness/speed etc at DS's level rather than a bunch of 6/7yos.
DH is an additional issue. He, IMO, doesn't have enough patience with DS and is not positive or encouraging enough. He says it is because he doesn't want DS to be like him.
Sorry for the ramble. Thanks for reading. I don't know what to do with the football, the bike, the swimming, DS's general physical confidence. I am nipping out to lunch for now but will be back in an hour.