NOW is the Best Time for Your TEEN to Start Dancing

With all the pressures and expectations of being a teenager, it's easy for a teen to lose focus and experience any number of typical teenage problems. Navigating these years, especially during a pandemic, can be challenging. It's easy for teens to get off track and start misbehaving, becoming depressed, or hanging with the wrong crowd. The isolation they have faced recently has added more to their stress hormones. Their grades may have suffered or they became introverted and start getting in trouble, but as frustrated as this time has been for both parents and teens, participating in fun and creative activities, like dance, has helped many teens turn the situation around.

Once they have decided to consider dance as an option, many teens and tweens worry about when is the best time to start. Don't stress that it may be too late. Over the past 3 decades of teaching, I have seen that it is NEVER too late to learn how to dance. In fact NOW is the best time for your teen to start dancing!

Why?

Teens need a safe place to release the anxiety they are under.

When your teen is dancing there's no space in their brain to stress out about day-to-day life. When they enter the dance studio they leave their stress and worries at the door and simply enjoy their body's movement. Dancing really does lift their spirits, according to a study that tested the effects of dancing on teens with depression. Patients who participated in an upbeat group dance showed the fewest depression symptoms and the most vitality. Does your teen have the blues? Tell them to grab a friend and come join us for a dance class.

Dance is an all-around healthy activity for teens.

We all need a little bit more exercise in our lives¦teens included. And when it comes to getting some much-need cardio, dance delivers very nicely. Plus, dance is also an excellent way to build an all around fit body. Learning to dance takes years of hard work and the lifelong reward is amazing because dance is good for their head, heart, lungs and bones.

Dance builds life skills, resilience and determination.

Through dance, a teen learns to keep trying despite failed attempts at a particular step or movement. Dance dishes out a few slices of humble pie, but with it they will get an excellent dose of self-esteem, self-respect and self-confidence. And whether it is their new-found self worth or their newly flexed, bulging brain, it can actually help to achieve better grades in school, handle peer pressure, manage their emotions and many other things that the teen years throw at their precious, indecisive, impassioned, nervous, fickle, impulsive, temperamental, sensitive, spontaneous darling.

Dance Develops Discipline and Independence

Teenagers want to start being independent by doing what they want, when they want. The discipline taught in dance classes can help teenagers learn to be independent in a healthy way. Learning to be independent is not a bad thing. But, doing it the correct way will help the relationship between the teenager and their parents, friends, and other loved ones.

Dancing Improves Their Brain.

Dancing helps improve memory. Science shows that a variety of exercises like dance can help support the part of their brain that controls their memory. By learning new skills, routines, and movements, their teen will challenge their brain to be flexible and remember new things. Dance requires teens to use multiple parts of their brain at the same time “ music stimulates the brain's reward centres, while dance activates its sensory and motor circuits. This increased brain power improves their mental sharpness, agility, intelligence and, dare I say it moms and dads, increase attention span!

Dance can help teens recover from injuries.

Dancing helps develop muscles, improve circulation, improve posture, balance, coordination and promote greater flexibility. Flexibility is often overlooked as a benefit but it can really decrease the chances of injury. Dance is often used as a cross training activity for other sports because of the full body conditioning and flexibility it provides.

Dance is a great way to meet people with similar interests.

Sometimes the teenage years can be challenging socially, to say the least. It can be hard to meet new people who teens can really identify with and make lasting connections. Dance is a great way to connect with a diverse group of other teens who all come together for a similar cause.

Dance provides an environment of love and positivity.

Many teenagers desperately need a place to go and an activity to participate in that is wholesome and can provide a healthy outlet to escape from the challenges and pressures of everyday life as a teen. The dance studio makes a fantastic escape from harsh realities and helps promote a positive outlook. The teen years are a trying time in life¦there's peer pressure and many other things that are at the forefront of concern, day in and day out. Fortunately, dance provides an excellent dose of self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence through its opportunities for learning and making notable accomplishments.

Fun & Creativity.

Dancing can be one of the best ways for your teen to express themself creatively and even unlock new ideas they can use in their daily life. They can learn how to express their personality, emotions, and ideas through the art of dance as a new outlet for their creativity.

Teens need to feel and look confident

All of these benefits will lead to bright and shining confidence that is sure to last on and off the dance floor. Confidence isn't just a feeling, either; it is also shown through posture. Dancing teaches great posture, and studies have found that good posture leads to decreased self-doubt. So when a teen learns how to hold their posture, they will feel more confidence in themselves.

LEARN MORE ABOUT TEEN CLASSES TO ENROLL IN! Click here to try a class for free!

Thank you to our amazing community for the honor of teaching you and giving us the opportunity to CHANGE LIVES THROUGH DANCE!

Laguna Niguel, CA