Gymnastics for children - straw poll

[allgonebellyup]

Carrying on from the other thread, im just wondering if there are many of you with dds who do gym?
my dd is 8 and does 12hrs (including half day on saturdays)of gym a week, and has just joined her county squad too, so thats another 4hrs every 2-3wks.
She absolutely lives and breathes gymnastics.

Would you let your dd do it?
Are you worried about the costs of comps, leotards etc (£100 plus each)?
Do you worry about too many hours affecting social life or schoolwork?

My 2 both do gymnastics, but very much at a recreational level - they are not born to be gymnasts I don't think!

I guess it's one of those things that if they're going to be good they just need to do those hours - music is the same which is what I'm in.

I definitely would let the children do it, as long as they were happy. Socially, I think being really involved in something can carry its own social life. Schoolwork - as long as the school are happy, again, I wouldn't worry about it. I'm sure doing anything to a high level reaps its own rewards! She sounds like she's doing fantastically well! Be proud!

All mine have tried it, DD1 and 2 gave up after a couple of years. DD3 has just started and seems to love it, but she is only five. TBH the other mum's at gym scare me slightly, they seem so intense and competitive and obsessive about their children's performance.
We do have one close friend whose child is very talented - same age as your DD and does a similar number of hours. She is a lovely girl and talented in a number of different directions but putting the hours into gym is clearly her own choice.
I would let my DD do it if it was very clearly her own choice, but I would worry about the effect on the rest of her life, and quite honestly on the rest of the family - I have seen siblings who have definitely been made to take a back seat to a talented gymnast in the family and dragged around from competition to competition with no time to do their own thing. I think that is very wrong and sadly far too common.

yes i know what you mean about the competitive mums! ooh they scare me too.. although sometimes i catch myself joining in on the comparisons of who perfected the best dismount etc etc!
Also the thought of dragging dd and ds up and down the country to endless competitions fills me with dread, although dd assures me she cant wait to be on the south east "elite" team.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

£100+ for comps and leotards EACH?! To think I chose it because it would be cheaper than ballet!

DD (4) started a couple of weeks ago, but she is miffed that her friend joined with her, but he didn't go back

Flame - I think some mothers get into a bit of competitive spending - you CAN spend that amount of money on leotards, but you don't HAVE to. I bought DD her leotard on Ebay for a tenner, would have been around £30 new.
But most children do it for fun, very, very few get to that elite level where they are competing at county level. And of those, a fair proportion (not including you AGBU!) have got very obsessive parents pushing them to an unhealthy extent.

i am friendly with a few of the mums whose dds are at county and regional level and even on the Olympic 2012 team!!! they are actually lovely and not pushy at all, it is their daughters who really want to do it, some of the mums are sick and tired of travelling to training (30-50miles each way, every night).
Although in my dds group there are very pushy parents!!!

Training leotards are fine from ebay and we get ours from there, but for comps where you have to represent your town/county, leotards are ordered specially for EACH comp and thats when they are £80-120 ish each.

bump

allgone, I've got 2 dd's in gym - 12 and 10 yrs.

the younger one is quite talented but the blinkin training schedule drives me nuts and I think is too much for her on school nights - it's basically every night plus Saturday. She starts to look white faced and sunken eyed and that's not what I wanted when we first joined the club.

I've told her I'm prepared to let her go three nights plus Saturday. For me too...how the heckk am I supposed to do everything else with other kids, dogs, and dh (in that order!!!)?

On the plus side, they both love what they do, have performed around the country and went to Austria this summer.

I've done two round trips to the gym tonight of course and should be in bed by now!!

omg you lot are scaring me. we have quite a serious gym club near us and they came to the school recently "talent scouting". they invited dd for 4 weeks free trial. there's no way we could cope with her ending up doing it every night. [hat crosses fingers that dd turns out to be overwhelmingly average and/or looses interest. bad mum.]

often wish that dd10 was average but she really loves it and is good, and dd12 is not particularly talented (and has asthma) but is getting great self-esteem boosts from it.

Just have to keep reminding myself,

all this blasted ferrying...is my job!

lots of people tell me it good for when they hit teenagerdom to have a sport they love.

Round here you need to be a competitive mum to even get your child enrolled. Ages ago when dd wanted to do gym & I went to find out about it I found her name needed to have been down years before so we never did it. Just recently a teacher caught her doing 'flips' (and I really don't know what sort) in the playground and insisted she came to lunchtime gym club at school which she's enjoying, but it's only ever going to be a fun club for her - starting at 12 is really way too late for anything else.

Difficult one. The problem as I see it is that these children put huge amounts of time and effort into an activity to the exclusion of lots of other things, then suddenly at 13 or so , discover that theya ren't going to be the one in 10,000 that actually go any further (apologies if your dd is that one!)

My dd used to do 4 hours a week and another 2 of trampolining, and I thought that was too much. I was very pleased when she gave up the gym.

And the other mothers are SCARY - what with their glitter hair spray cans and their freakish ability to do french plaits!