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Home › Articles › Development › Tumbling Toddlers

Tumbling Toddlers

Good for the Body and Brain

By Gwen Morrison

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Involving your child in gymnastics at an early age can be an extremely rewarding experience. Along with an hour of fun and frolic, children are able to experience how their body moves, socialize with other children and enjoy the thrill of learning a new skill.

Where to Start
Jeff Lula, president of Fun & Fit Gymnastics Centers in Santa Clarita, Calif., and a member of the USA Gymnastics Preschool Advisory Board, believes that to find positive programs, parents need to look at the philosophy of the organization and the skills of the coaches in creating success for all children.

"Parents should look for programs that define winning as 'personal best' instead of being better than others," says Lula. "Teachers need to be positive, fun and trained to help all children learn safely at their own level of skill readiness."

Lula stresses that to ensure the safe and positive introduction of gymnastics skills, a teacher must first determine the learning readiness of every individual student. This can be determined in three parts:

  • Physical Readiness – the strength, flexibility, kinesthetic and cardio-respiratory development of the child;
  • Mental Readiness – the child's ability to understand the skill, focus the mind and concentrate adequately;
  • Emotional Readiness – the ability of the child to manage the level of excitement, stress or fear associated with gymnastics.

"An effective and experienced teacher will quickly become aware of the readiness of each child and adjust the challenges to be within the child's ability to successfully achieve comfortably and confidently," says Lula. "In doing so, the teacher will be setting the child up for successful experiences, building the child's self-confidence and making the lesson more fun and enjoyable."

What to Expect
For children younger than 1 year old, the focus should be on discovering their natural movement abilities. At this level, parental involvement is necessary as children learn to discover the world of movement by crawling, climbing, swinging and tumbling for the first time.


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