Most parents are unaware of the tremendous advantages that play climbing can offer to young children. Not only do they provide a variety of physical benefits, they can also greatly improve a child’s self-esteem. Let us explore some of the wonderful benefits below!

Increase in Muscle Strength

Play climbing requires young children to exert the muscles in their limbs. For example, they need to push themselves up with their legs and pull themselves up with their arms when climbing up a rope ladder. When climbing down, they need to use the muscles in their arms to hold on as they find footholds with their legs. This means that frequent play climbing can help your child to build muscle strength in their limbs in a fun, healthy, and engaging way. This will greatly benefit them when they play sports or attend gym classes at school.

Opportunity for Physical Exercise

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advise that preschool children aged 3 to 5 be physically active throughout the day. This ensures healthy physical development and facilitates the maintenance of a healthy weight. Encouraging your child to play climb is a great way to keep them active.

Development of Fine and Gross Motor Skills

Gross motor skills refer to the ability to use the muscles in the arms, legs, and torso to carry out motor activities. Meanwhile, fine motor skills refer to the ability to the smaller muscles in the fingers and hands to accomplish more delicate tasks. Since children need to move their arms and legs when climbing up or down, play climbing facilitates the practice of their gross motor skills. Since they need to manipulate their fingers to hold onto whatever they are climbing, the practice of their fine motor skills is facilitated as well. Improvement in gross and fine motor skills is achieved with frequent practice and play climbing is a fun and effective way for your child to do just that.

Improving Hand-Eye Coordination

Hand-eye coordination refers to the ability to interpret visual information from the eyes and move the hands accordingly to accomplish the desired task. Play climbing is fantastic to help your child nurture this skill. When play climbing a spider net for example, your child needs to take in and process visual information to determine potential footholds and handgrips on the spider net before making their move. Throughout the whole climb, they would be applying hand-eye coordination over and over again. What better way to improve on this skill than with play climbing?

Boosting Self-Esteem

By giving your child frequent opportunities to engage in play climbing, you allow them to gradually hone their skills. Eventually, they will become agile and efficient at play climbing. This gives them a sense of accomplishment as well as something to show off to their friends during playtime, which will do wonders for their self-esteem. Your child’s confidence may even help them in making new friends.

Prevent a Fear of Heights

Acrophobia, also known as a fear of heights, is one of the most common phobias. It is estimated that 3 to 5% of the general population suffers from this phobia. Providing your child with regular opportunities to play climb will allow them to get used to heights, preventing the development of this phobia in the future.

As you can see, play climbing comes with plenty of advantages for your child. Invest in a home gym today to let your child climb every day!