Judo is a lot more popular in Europe than in Malaysia. It's not surprising then to hear that over there, it's quite common for parents to train in judo with their children. For some, judo is a family social activity.
For much of our existence as a club, we focused on developing an adult judo program. That was the case when we were in Cheras, it was also the case when we moved to Damansara Perdana, and it remained the case when we moved to Bangsar.
All along we had had calls from parents asking for a children's class but we resisted starting such a class because we felt our adult program was still not stable. Towards the end of our stint in Bangsar, we started to toy with having a children's class and by the time we moved to Pudu, we decided it was time to have a kids program.
We had a small group of kids who were the pioneering batch. Their ages ranged from 7 to 13. We'd occasionally get inquiries from parents on whether their kids could start around the age of 3 or 4. We felt we weren't ready to take on such small kids.
Then, one of the parents whose nine-year old daughter trained with us was keen to send his younger daughter, aged 4, to take up judo. We decided to give it a try, especially since in recent weeks, there had been a few queries about a class for small children.
The idea of Family Judo cropped up when I began thinking about how to make small children comfortable and confident on the judo mat. The answer is to have their parents on the mat with them!
So, I proposed this to a few parents and we had our first trial session for this last Sunday. Quite a few parents trained with their kids and it was a success. We hope this program will take off and becomes a regular feature of our Sunday sessions.
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