Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he explains why it is important to allow children of different ages to participate in group activities together.
Multi-age activities help socialize children so that they are able to balance their social and emotional differences. These group activities also help kids learn to work more cooperatively together, not just right now but also as they continue growing and maturing in the future. People sometimes don’t realize how important this is. But in reality, multi-age activities address some of the emotional development issues in children that are important in life and society as we grow up.
The older we get, the more important it is to understand cooperative functioning and also to respect each other’s differences and strengths. Multi-age activities can help children get to this point, by exposing them to groups they may not otherwise get the opportunity to work with. Within these groups, children get the chances to take on different roles—such as being the oldest in one particular group, and the youngest in a different set of kids. When experiencing these different roles, boys and girls are allowed the opportunity to behave differently than they may otherwise behave in a group of children who are all their age. This is going to help them down the line, as they mature, in terms of their emotional development.
You can still do different and challenging activities between the two groups, as well. Just because you are putting children of different ages together doesn’t mean the older children have to feel bored. But that social interaction and acceptance of how to play with someone who may be older or different in some way is valuable as a learning lesson.
At My Gym, we help socialize children by offering a summer camp for kids anywhere from 2 years old to 12 years old. The kids work cooperatively together and learn how to function in groups with others who may be younger or older. Interestingly, however, the girls and boys tend to behave differently when it comes to these group activities.
In the females, what happens is the big girls tend to become role models and end up mothering the younger ones in the group. At the same time, the little ones love this, and they tend to cluster and gravitate toward the big girls. This is just a generalization, but it is what we see in our multi-age activities here at My Gym.
The boys, meanwhile, tend to cluster together more with other boys of a similar age. For them, these group activities that we put on are more about learning how to stop themselves from being too dominant. The older boys are trying to learn how to be gentle with the younger kids—and that is something that obviously boys should be learning as they get older. Because of the strength differences, the size differences and the emotional differences, they need to continue working on this down the road. So that’s how multi-age activities can really help with the emotional growth and development process.
