Risky Kids LogoRisky Kids
Kids Spartan Partnership
Family Skills
23 July 2024

Facing Obstacles: The Best Things for a Family

How to read our work

60 second skim5 minute read

We know you know how to read! But life is busy, you're busy and this might not be what you're looking for. Skim it first, read it later.

Each Risky Kids Article can be read:

  • In it's entirety (just read it all), or
  • Skim read. To skim read it, just read The FOCUS, SUMMARY and then all of the DOT POINTS and you're done!

Focus

It can be tough finding ways to not just promote healthy risk taking as a family, but also to create lasting memories. Luckily there’s a few awesome events around which let you do just this, and if you’re really feeling like it, get involved yourself!

Summary

Obstacle races provide an excellent opportunity for kids to engage in healthy risk-taking, building resilience and confidence. Guided events like the Spartan Kids Race allow families to support their children’s growth through challenging yet rewarding experiences.

  • Obstacle races help kids engage in healthy risk-taking.
  • Facilitated risk-taking builds resilience and confidence.
  • Preparing and foreknowledge reduce anxiety and increase excitement.
  • Use negotiation to help kids navigate fear on race day.
  • Encourage pushing through “easy” challenges to continue growth.

Obstacle Races are for Risky Kids

Obstacle races like the Spartan Kids Race help children build resilience, confidence, and lasting memories.

  • Guided events enhance growth more than unstructured play.
  • Obstacle races provide a controlled environment for healthy risk-taking.
  • Families can bond and witness their children’s growth together.

Kids love to run, jump, climb and of course take risks. It’s a big part of their developmental processes and it’s crucial to help find ways to let them engage with it. The more they do this in a healthy way the more resilient they’ll be, the more confident they’ll be and the more memorable and rich their childhood memories will be.

As a family it’s about more than just letting kids “run wild”. Of course there’s a place for that as well, but what’s most powerful is finding communities, events and places where this process is guided and celebrated.

Obstacle races like the Spartan Kids Race is the perfect place for a family to find all of this, to take their kids out and wrestle with adversity together. You’ll find that this isn’t just a way to help your young people grow, but you’ll get to know them better and see their growth happening before your eyes.

What Is Facilitated Risk?

Facilitated risk-taking, like participating in a Kids Spartan Race, helps children develop essential life skills.

  • Natural risk-taking builds confidence and trust within families.
  • Guided challenges enhance physical and emotional growth.
  • Kids face and overcome adversity, creating lasting positive memories.

Of course there’s natural risk taking, which is important. Letting your kids play at the playground and take risks, or be in the backyard or running around the school grounds out of your sight. This gives them critical time to test their theories, to encounter and navigate fear, anxiety, uncertainty and develop the strategies to manage them. It also builds trust among the family, as young people know that they’re trusted to challenge themselves, but also that there will be someone there if they need it.

The step above this is our passion at Risky Kids. Where you take that developmental process and guide and shape it to achieve its greatest potential. You explore thoughts and feelings around risk taking and the emotional experience and how to navigate it. You craft and shape the challenges, both physical and emotional, that young people face and guide them through them. You deliver adversity in measures that require growth to push through, and give support at a level that’s just enough for them to succeed, but for it to be their success.

This is what facilitated risk is, and why it’s so powerful. Events like a Kids Spartan Race is one of the best ways. The obstacles are designed for kids, young people can push themselves as hard as they like, and families can help to guide them through the event. They’ll face failure, triumph, success and heaps of great emotions. Most of all it’ll be something that they’ll remember for years to come, and shape them for the better.

Spartan-kids-01

Excitement, Then Nerves

Kids’ initial excitement about a race can turn into nerves as the event approaches.
  • Nervousness before the race is a normal fear response.
  • Foreknowledge reduces anxiety by familiarizing kids with the event.
  • Preparation and reframing help build confidence and manage fears.

Kids will often be excited and eager at the start, perhaps even a little anxious when you talk about getting booked in for the race. This is all normal! Kids see themselves conquering the course, emerging victorious and there isn’t a lot of fear because it’s in the future.

As the event gets closer, you’ll find that they start to get more nervous. This is a typical fear response, as the event gets closer in terms of both time and proximity, the chances of “avoidance” behaviour increases. This is normal, and what we want to do is help increase the chances of “approach” behaviours, like being excited over fearful.

You can do this by exploring three important things: Foreknowledge, Preparing, Reframing.

  • FOREKNOWLEDGE – Simply talk to your young person about what the event is going to be like, visit the website and watch clips of kids at the race. This foreshadowing process means that their imagination can’t run wild with impossible obstacles or being injured!
  • PREPARING – The next part is to prepare! Get out and work on monkey bar skills, climbing over things, running, balancing and jumping. Preparation helps to diminish fear, and increase confidence, as well as being fun and healthy! Set 20 minutes of Spartan Training every night in the backyard, at school after classes, wherever!
  • REFRAMING – Talk to your young person about what might be concerning, or exciting them! Reframe any unhealthy thinking, for example they might be afraid of failing and obstacle. Ask them why they’re afraid, and they might say they’ll be embarrassed. Reframe this to focus on how lots of people will be falling, and that trying is the most important thing. Create a plan for what to do if they do fail something, such as trying again, and this will make them feel prepared to face those moments.
94a89509-59bf-4075-b49e-fb70554e4379

Navigating The Day

Race day is filled with excitement, new experiences, and plenty of nerves for kids.
  • Explore the event area and plan strategies together.
  • Engage in conversations to check in on their feelings.
  • Warm up with fun activities to reduce anxiety and prepare.

The day itself is going to be a big one! Lots of strangers, new obstacles if you’re a new Spartan fam, and heaps of exciting things in the festival area. This is going to create a lot of excitement and nerves. Take time to walk around and check everything out! Go check out the obstacles and start planning with your young people how they’ll overcome them. Go check out the finish line and see the medals and shirts and they’ll earn. Go talk to another family that’s just finished and ask their kids about the race!

Of course don’t forget to talk to your mini-Spartan about how they’re feeling. Do some check ins with them and make sure they’ve got everything they need! Even though young bodies don’t really need it, doing a fun warm up with some games like tag, or some cartwheels will get their brains ready and help them to feel more prepared to race and bring down anxiety.

How To Overcome Obstacles

If your mini-Spartan feels anxious, use foreknowledge, preparation, and reframing to help them.

  • Validate their feelings as normal and healthy.
  • Listen to their worries and ask clarifying questions.
  • Guide them by reframing fears and planning for obstacles together.

If your mini-Spartan is feeling uneasy or anxious, make sure to use the foreknowledge, preparation and reframing tools from earlier. Even if you’re standing in the festival area, you can whip out your phone and look up some clips of how to do obstacles, discuss what to do if we fail.

At Risky Kids one of our most powerful tools is our Negotiation process. This is how we help a young person to dig through fear and reframe it to help them move forward. Below is a super-quick crash course to use on the day!

  • Step 1 – Validate: Let them know the way their feeling is normal, and even healthy! Fear helps our brain pay attention, and powers up our body for action. Make sure they don’t feel alone and let them know even though they might not be able to see other kids who are nervous, they’re there!
  • DON’T: Don’t say “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to”, trust us! This triggers deep avoidance behaviour and will make guiding your young person almost impossible after you say it.
  • Step 2 – Listen: Ask them how they’re feeling, and what they’re worried about. Ask clarifying questions. If they say they’re afraid of getting hurt, ask how they think they’ll get hurt. If they say they’re scared, ask them what they’re scared about.
  • DON’T: You should avoid asking questions focusing on the obstacles or the race itself. Instead focus on the feelings that are happening.
  • Step 3 – Guide: Take what you’ve learned, and guide your Risky Kid! Reframe their fears, talk about how proud they’ll be when they finish and how important it is to face challenges. Let them know you’ll be there to help, and that they can take each obstacle one at a time and plan together how to get through it.

Make sure to refer back to all of the preparation and talks you had before the race!

Busting Plateaus & “It’s Easy”

Sometimes your mini-Spartan will be resilient and ready, but it’s important to add new challenges.
  • Increase difficulty by going faster or entering competitive waves.
  • Encourage them to aim higher and tackle new challenges.
  • Affirm their effort and work on breaking through “ok-plateaus.”

Of course there’s the flip side as well! Sometimes you’ll turn up to an event and your min-Spartan will be resilient and ready to go. This isn’t a time to kick back and pat yourself on the back because you’re such a great parent (even though you all are), this is what facilitate risk is about! You’ve got to find a way to add that adversity for your young person.

Obstacles like a Spartan Race are only as difficult as you make them. Going faster, entering competitive waves, beating obstacles that you failed at last time, setting sights on adult races and age category or even elite placement and then heading off to race across the globe! If you find your Risky Kid saying “it’s easy” or “I’m bored” then you want to jump in with both feet!

At Risky Kids we have a Mindset, “It’s Not Easy, You’re Good” where we reflect on all of the effort, training and diligence that led to something feeling easy. To affirm all of that effort encourages it, and builds self confidence. Then the next step is to go from “good” to “amazing”. Work with your mini-Spartan on ways to bust through their “ok-plateaus”. There’s so many ways to do this, check out our article on why busting through plateaus are so important!

Reflection and Planning for More!

Each event like a Spartan Race is going to be an awesome adventure for you and your family. The opportunity to take it from being “just” a fun weekend to a milestone and a way to facilitate your young people reaching their greatest potential doesn’t take much. A few conversations, a couple of training sessions and you’ll see the difference. A kid’s natural love of risk and a human’s natural attraction to challenge will do the rest.

And of course with an event like Spartan there’s always something we can do better! After each race talk about what was the best parts, and the most challenging parts. Each obstacle that we failed is something to encourage your young person to work on between now and the next race.

There’s nothing better than that moment a Spartan overcomes that obstacle that once overcame them. Check out the links below and find your nearest Kids Spartan Race!

Don’t forget to use this code: 2024RiskyVIC10 for a 10% discount on your race entry!

Richard Williams

Richard Williams

Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming

Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.

Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:

  • Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
    (Australia/NZ/Global)
  • OCR World Championship Finalist –  Team & Solo (2015)
  • OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
  • Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years

Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:

  • Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
  • Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
  • Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX