In the first stage, we have a lot of early engagement due to the novelty and newness of the skills, and also have large and frequent improvements, often leading to high enjoyment!

While later stages will begin to explore what it’s like as we start to master our skills, first we have to navigate the challenging and sometimes frustrating Grasp stage. This is where persistence is required, and many families and Risky Kids might struggle as it can be difficult.

However it’s critical to navigate, and as always the process of working our way through it is its own reward, as we learn the resilience we’ll need later, and also begin to master our skills.

For example, in Karate your kid might go up a belt, or in Gymnastics they might join a new skill level. Risky Kids has program steps, Foundation, Alpha, Alpha+ and so on. Each of these has sort of a Novelty reset.

Learning is often blended. We’re not just learning the skill in its entirety, but dozens, sometimes hundreds of smaller skills and mastering different parts of that skill. For example, Soccer isn’t just about ball skills. It’s about strategy, team mechanics, personalities, training drills and much more.

You’re likely to see engagement “reset” when a young learner moves up a level, and even the re-emergence of Novelty stage behaviour, however they’ll quickly settle back into the overall pattern of their learning.

What we’re going through is that we’ve often learned a lot of the basics and fundamental skills, and now we’re trying to connect them all together to be able to accomplish more advanced and challenging tasks. However, we’re doing this when we don’t have a lot of experience or knowledge on how to solve the problem we’re likely to face.

For this reason, our learning, which was happening in big, quick strides, will slow down considerably. We start to make more mistakes, and we even start messing up the basic skills! This is because we haven’t really mastered them yet, and as we try and use them in more sophisticated ways, we lose focus on keeping their standard up.

Even as we’re being offered feedback and guidance, we can feel frustrated. Even with great support, we can still feel a bit lost on how to apply it, and as we’re making mistakes it’s almost impossible for us to understand what’s causing them yet. All of this means that even the smallest failures are magnified.

It’s frustrating and not filled with a lot of big moments of triumph. But this makes it critical for learners, because no matter what they’re learning, they’re going to have to go through this step.

What that means is that the more often we come face to face with this step while learning, the more resilient we become. Not only does our learner work their way through this particular instance of learning, but they’ll also be able to understand how they deal with frustration, failure and this slowed learning.

This is a translatable skill, and one that’s an important part of our teaching process at Risky Kids. We specifically help young people to understand and expect this challenge, and teach them also to relish it as a sign that they’ve started the journey toward mastery! Sadly, this is a stage that many families will misunderstand, and unenroll.

We can often feel that because it’s so difficult, that we’re simply not meant to learn this skill. At most, we just don’t like the way it feels and for that reason we want those negative feelings to stop.

It’s also difficult for learners at this stage when it comes to receiving feedback. Not just because it can be difficult to apply, but because this now comes into conflict with their self perception that they were doing well because of all of the early wins!

Families are 187% more likely to unenroll from a program during these stages than if they persist through. We often confuse the fact that young people are frustrated and even disengaged with the fact that this must not be “for them”, or that those feelings aren’t important.

They’re crucial though, and normal to experience, as part of this learning process. For this reason, we ask all families to approach us each time their Risky Kid struggles with motivation and engagement. We perform a review of what stages they’re likely to be in, pair it with all of our team’s observations and observations from home and create a strategy to decide with the family and Risky Kid what the best next steps are.

Sometimes that DOES turn out to be unenrolment, but in most cases, it’s addressing issues of self confidence or frustrations.

When your Risky Kid is going through the Grasp Stage, the most common behaviours you’re likely to see will be:

• Frustration with slowed learning,
• Drops in enjoyment, enthusiasm and/or engagement,
• Attraction to other hobbies or sports to recapture the “novelty” feel,
• Magnified emotions around failure or perceived failure,
• Language such as “I’m bored”, “I don’t want to go”, etc.

In the case of your Risky Kids learning going well at this stage, make sure to celebrate it with them! If they do disengage, which is very common at these steps, make sure to validate how they feel, but not their desire to quit.

Families should be prepared to emphasise persistence and strategies to work through low motivation, like goal setting, asking for help from coaches, exploring the root of emotions and of course it’s important that families are prepared to feel some tough feelings themselves as their Risky Kids struggle.

Statements like “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to” should be replaced with “What do you think has changed and who can we ask for help?”. For more advice on navigating disengagement, check out our articles on The Art Of Quitting! Most importantly, work with your Risky Kids team if you see early signs of disengagement.

Our learners are going to begin to unlock their skills, but also to encounter plateaus which they might confuse with reaching the limit of their skills. It’s an exciting time with the next steps though as we get closer to mastery!