For the Love of Children:The Importance of Emotionally Safe and Structured Training with Kids in Systema

Alot of people may be surprised at the heavy dose of children's work Andrey Karimov offers at his extensive seminars. Our 21 day seminar in St. Petersburg offered up a nice sized portion of in depth work with children. Before I go any further, Mr. Karimov is a practicing psychologist and has carefully spent several years constructing these modules for children and their emotional health. Each game and series is designed with a few key components in mind :

• identifying children's deep, emotional issues by gauging responses to activities
• helping each child work through such issues
• allowing parents to partake in witnessing their children's independence and strengths 
• formulate a strong sense of identity and free thinking 
• allowing children to try and succeed in a safe, nurturing environment without judgement

Does your kid have the wiggles? Body language is very telling.

• giving parents, specifically fathers, ideas and formulas to help improve relationships with not only their children, but the children around them

and much more.... each activity starts out quite abruptly with the balalaika(yes, I know...you don't know how to play one, don't have one, or don't understand why it's needed....) Remember the game musical chairs? The music played while we all ran around to get to the last chair but the minute it stopped, it was game on?
This, is how the balalaika is used. Now , if you try this in your school, you can certainly use whatever instrument or music of choice but the key is to be consistent. As with anything with children, consistency fosters stability.

Is you Systema kid's class helping or hurting them?

Mr. Karimov often started each session simply by monitoring the children. It was almost a given that the adults in the room were not to interfere or redirect the children in any way...(and if you know me personally, you must know how incredibly difficult this was for me). Without any cues or directions, Karimov began to play the balalaika at a moderate pace, he then would build speed and abruptly stop. The kids, once they heard the music, would run around the room(floor covered in mats) and drop to the ground and stop, when the music stopped. Usually, there would be a few seasoned kids in the group that knew of the routine and seemingly, the other kids just followed along. Again, not much , if any direction from the adults. Once the children stopped(most dropped to the floor face down), Mr. Karimov would quietly point out the children who were unable to keep still...the ones peeking, wiggling, shifting positions, or still walking around....
These were your rule breakers , for lack of a better term.Which is not necessarily a bad thing. These kids also maybe had a difficult time in general by not having a calm demeanor and often times would look back at their parents for approval to make sure they were doing the drill correctly. Again, there was alot to be said by witnessing this display of simple body language.
This all begged to ask the question, what were we teaching our children, in "Systema" in the United States? I know of maybe a few instructors who have done a great job formulating really amazing kid's classes , but that's only a handful. I've found more instructors who have completely thrown the baby out with the bathwater by having kids line up only to punch one another and claiming this was their anti-bullying program.
No one talks about the psychological effect of improper training, or how to help parents foster better relationships or even...dare I say, gets fathers involved?? Not anyone I've heard of.

And how does this pertain to you , as a martial artist? If you have a child, and you spend a ton of time away from you child, training...doing mainly "systema" things, why not utilize that time to the benefit of your parent/child relationship? Not only did some of our best warm up routines come from working with the children at our seminar, almost all of us had a ton of fun, were completely limber and loose, and all of us reached a level of training much more effectively than if we JUST DID SIT UPS.

Barring the musical mat exercise, the demonstrations that followed blew my mind(luckily, the adults got to play too!)...

The great and unmatchable Masha...you'll be hearing more about her

One demonstration in particular, knocked me off my feet, figuratively and literally. Mr. Karimov and a partner each had one end of a rope...they dragged the rope towards and lineup of children and either shifted the rope up or down forcing the children to make a snap-quick decision. Sounds easy? It's not. The goal of the game was to get children to understand that adaptability really is dependent upon them, not the people around them, and that they alone, were responsible for their decisions, so merely mimicking their cohorts may not work for them, especially since the rope was being moved at different angles. And guess what? Same game for adults and almost all of us fell. Why? Perhaps because we have what Mr. Karimov refers to as "maladaptive programming". We are conditioned to overthink, overdo, and over prepare for everything. Pre-jumping over a rope , as an adult, will most certainly land you on your face..(yes, this happened to me). Waiting until the right moment to decide whether you should leap, drop to the ground or merely slowly walk over the rope, was a key way in identifying what your natural behavioral patterns were, and for children, this is key for their parents to understand.

• Are you raising an overconfident child who is impulsive? Early rope jumper.
• Are you raising a child who struggles to decide what to do and goes with the crowd? Cautious rope jumper.
• Are you raising a child who makes the very obvious wrong choices frequently? Opposite end goal determination rope jumper.
• Are you raising a child who waits until the very last minute , but makes a successful choice? Again, cautious, yet thoughtful rope jumper.

Not as easy as it looks. Better than sit ups, squats, rolls and pushups.

You get the idea. And this was only one game, of many, many games. This game, by the way, works great for adults and the kids LOVE to watch the adults play. Not only do you get a heavy dose of plyometrics on board, you start to really work on yourself. Now that I look back at pictures of myself doing this demo, I can reflect on what it felt like participating. Not only was I wearing a skirt, I
noticed that I waited until the moment the rope touched me to move. Again, I'm not a big fan of using excessive energy ( I'm old, what can I say?), but this also is a slow process I've learned to use throughout my life. Normally, I would have panicked, already wondered how I would jump or which direction, but knowing that Karimov was liable to raise the rope in any direction almost gave me a better sense of calm in my own quick decision making and adaptability skills. I , in fact, was relearning to trust my own judgement.

Again..this was a game designed for children, but worked really well for all of us. I will be continuing writing about child-specific , and emotionally safe children's games and training from the seminar in St. Petersburg with a highlighted focus on the importance of adequate work with children. Oh, and at the end of each children's session, the kids lined up to thank the adults... mutual respect was very key in wrapping up each session.

***Photos courtesy of the great Evgeny"Eugenious" Pechkin. You'll be hearing more about him too.