The Intangible Benefits of Dance for your Child
It is easy to list the many tangible effects of dance on children.
These physical benefits of dance are widely accepted, but what about the intangible benefits?
The things you don’t always see and can’t always measure; the emotional, social and cognitive attributes of dance have only recently begun to be appreciated but dance teachers have known them anecdotally for centuries!
Children begin to make sense of sounds before they leave the womb and the first response to it is through movement of their body. It is pre-verbal, beginning before words can be formed. Children move naturally to express a thought or feeling, and they move because it is joyful and feels wonderful. Dance is a natural method for learning and children learn movement patterns as readily as they learn language.
Dance is simply structured movement, usually to music.
Dance involves a greater range of motion, coordination, strength and endurance than most other physical activities. This is accomplished through movement patterns that teach coordination and kinesthetic memory. Dancing utilizes the entire body and is an excellent form of exercise for total body fitness and this is why the physical benefits are so great!
· Improved condition of heart and lungs
· Increased muscular strength, endurance and aerobic fitness
· Better coordination
· Better agility
· Better flexibility
· Healthy blood pressure
· Improved overall balance
· Improved spatial awareness
·
In an ever-changing world of technology and sedentary “screen time” we cannot underestimate the benefits of remaining engaged in a regular physical activity such as dance.
But there is so much more to dancing than the physical elements.
Many things that aren’t as easily measured but can be witnessed over time.
At dance class, and particularly ballet class your child learns a sense of occasion , respect of the studio space , to appreciate the simplicity of a uniform and grooming policy , they learn a new set of ‘old school’ manners , they gain a new positive mentor in their lives in their dance teacher. Children make friends with peers outside of their academic school environment. All of these things align to help to improve their sense of well-being and shape their overall physical confidence, social skills, leading to greater self-esteem and motivation.
For even greater intangible benefits we need to look at Brain development and Mental dexterity.
Young children will create movement spontaneously when presented with movement ideas or problems that can be solved with a movement response.
Movement provides the cognitive loop between the idea, problem, or intent and the outcome or solution. This teaches an infant, child and, ultimately, adult to function in and understand the world. The relationship between structured dance and improved academic achievement is well documented.
When the dance student learns a new skill, a difficult combination or an entire dance their memory retention skills are sharpened. They must perform in time with the music, be spatially aware of their peers, watch themselves in the mirror to copy and correct, ALL while listening to their teacher give verbal instruction AND do it with a smile!!
This level of cognition requires huge amounts of focus and mental dexterity, the ability to think quickly. It is impossible to deny that these skills translate into improved academic performance for most children.
Dance is also proven to teach empathy, another fairly intangible benefit.
Dance is laced with both empathy and connectivity as dance is an international language for the whole human race.
A new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests that dancers are more empathetic than the average person, and that empathy can be learned. Researchers showed a group of professional dancers and a group of non-dancers the same footage of ballet dancing, blurred so that facial expressions were unrecognizable. The participants' emotional responses were monitored by electrodes, which showed that the dancers had a much stronger emotional response to what they saw on the screen.
What does this mean? Those with a dance background were more sensitive to others' physical expressions, which implies that this sensitivity can be trained. In other words, it's possible that our bodies can learn to be more empathetic through dance.
All of this information is fantastic to know and understand but what are the practical applications?
The only way to really find out is to ask students themselves.
When questioned as to what they thought the personal benefits of dance were…….
Lena 11ys says “Dance makes me forget about things that happened at school”.
Grace also 11 says” I get to meet people that share the same passion”.
Isla loves that it’s a place to just be yourself and have fun.
Zara another wise little 11 yr old summed it all up in one short but succinct statement.
“I feel really peaceful after dancing”
And who needs more proof or reason than that?
References
https://www.stagecoach.co.uk/blog/post/march-2014/benefits-of-dance-for-young-children
https://www.ndeo.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=893257&module_id=55419
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306234023_Dance_participation_and_academic_performance_in_youth_girls
https://www.dancemagazine.com/scientific-reason-dancers-empathetic-2307032389.html