Skiing or Snowboarding for Toddlers

You’ve been hearing and reading a lot about Skiing or Snowboarding for Toddlers. Now, you’re in a dilemma: which one should your kiddie start with—skiing or snowboarding? Each of these sports has its pluses and minuses, so choosing one over the other seems difficult.

Should you decide or leave it to the little one to choose what he prefers? Or is there a logical path that you need to follow so that your child learns both sports? Well, to begin with, on your next holiday in the hills, introduce him to the two sports and see what happens. 

You could also delve a little more into this subject and decide what’s best for your toddler by following our logic. Here are some pointers:

Age is a determinant for these sports

You may want your child to learn a winter sport as early as possible, but the right age to ski is as low as three years. That’s because their motor skills are still not completely developed so they won’t be able to maneuver snowboarding yet. But to snowboard, your child will have to wait till he’s seven years old. 

Do kids have falls and injuries when snowboarding

It’s commonly felt that when kids snowboard, they run the risk of falls and injuring themselves. These days, however, people believe that this isn’t the norm but that this experience varies from person to person. In both sports, kids can injure their wrists and arms, knees and legs. So, they must use safety gear before setting out. Check out some of the Best Ski Helmet for Toddler in the market. 

What does your child enjoy

The most important determinant here is that your child should enjoy what he learns. Whatever gives him more pleasure and more motivation to get over the difficult patches should be his choice of sport.  It’s neither wise nor fair to force him to learn a sport that he doesn’t instinctively take to or you’ll find him running away from winter sports.

Why Choose Skiing

Should skiing always be the window to winter sports

It’s not uncommon for parents to believe that teaching their toddlers to ski before they learn to snowboard will make them accept snowboarding easily at a later stage. In fact, both these sports are complementary to each other in terms of board techniques. 

But that’s where the similarity ends because both skiing and snowboarding are poles apart. By learning to ski, your kid can enjoy sledding and have a good view of the skiing slopes. But when it comes to managing balance, these two sports differ vastly.

So, while skiing might make it easier for your child to approach snowboarding, it’s not a basic need. 

Skiing is a natural sport

If you’re going to expose your child for the first time to winter slopes, it would be best that he started with skiing. That’s because it’s a more natural sport and will let him walk, which snowboarding won’t. 

Motor skills of snowboarding kids

It has been found that kids who snowboard before they learn to ski have less sophisticated motor skills and less developed muscles than their counterparts who ski at the same age. However, when learning to snowboard, kids need a different approach—first, they need a hands-on approach to learning the sport, accompanied by lessons; and secondly, if they are toddlers, the lessons should be one-on-one. 

To fill this demand for teaching toddlers to snowboard, snowboard companies like Burton have stepped in to harness technology to make all kinds of gear for them available. Everything that they need to get onto a board is made by this company—boards, boots, bindings, etc. 

This makes Burton the best snowboard company to have thoughtfully designed equipment and related needs for toddlers and very young children. The gear Burton makes is aimed at safety and to the way kids should learn this sport, a good example being his Riglet snowboard. 

This speciality snowboard doesn’t need bindings and works with a cord that instructors can hold and pull the little one in the snow. 

Why Choose Snowboarding

The better learning curve is… 

Kids make faster progress learning snowboarding rather than skiing because it’s not as technical as skiing and you can explore the slopes in this sport early in the learning phase. 

Snowboarding calls for a lot of motivation 

Though for both these sports, the first few hours of learning the sport involves a lot of falling and getting up, still snowboarding is the more difficult sport. So, kids could be turned off by all of this, so to continue they will need to be highly motivated, which may be difficult.

With snowboarding, you need a lot of balance 

Snowboarding calls for a lot of balance, while riding sideways needs to be done with greater accuracy. If a child makes even the smallest mistake, he could have a fall much faster than he would with skiing. 

Why skiing is better

It’s better for toddlers to begin with skiing as it builds a good foundation for kids. For children as young as toddlers, hand-eye coordination and picking up the nuances of the game are far easier with skiing than snowboarding. Besides, they also find it easier to go on the mountain and go all over on the slopes.

Once they learn to ski, they can easily transfer the skills they learn from this sport to snowboarding, which they will learn at a later age. Besides, they enjoy themselves moving at speed in the snow while skiing, thus making good progress at learning the sport. 

So, they will keep going to the slopes and improve on their skiing skills and become better skiers, in the process learning more techniques and strategies associated with the sport. They also learn to negotiate different kinds of terrain and do much more on the slopes. 

Once they master these skills, it will make learning snowboarding much easier. Snowboarding is easy for a new learner when he or she already knows how to negotiate different snow conditions and all the other nuances of skiing that were learned when he was enjoying himself.

Conclusion on Skiing or Snowboarding for Toddlers

Finally, whether it’s snowboarding or skiing, it has to be what your child goes for instinctively and enjoys. After all, there’s little point in forcing your ideas on your child when he has his own unique tastes and desires.