Encourage your children to learn to ski with confidence

If your children to learn to ski competently and confidently, you and they will get the most from your family ski holidays. As they progress, you’ll find the balance between encouraging them to practice their skills on gentle slopes whilst introducing more challenging terrain.

How will my child learn to ski?
Unless you’re a good skier yourself and you have a limitless supply of patience, the best approach is to arrange lessons with a resort ski school. Lessons for three and four-year-olds may only be an hour long, and will take place in a designated children’s area. There are often colourful hoops or markers to manoeuvre around and they spend a lot of time shuffling around getting their balance.

The best way that your children will pick up the basics is by copying. This is is great when they’re old enough to follow behind and they understand what they’re being told to do. As they grow older and progress, they’ll be taught the more technical aspects of how to ski. A ten-year-old will announce these facts with great delight!

Surely I can just teach my child myself?
That depends on much patience you have and that you're a reasonably competent skier yourself. We’ve taken our children out ourselves during our ski vacations from the age of three to reinforce what they’ve covered in their skiing lesson. At this age it’s quite a physical activity for you involving plenty of lifting to point junior in the right direction.

We’ve found skiing with children of this age group the most challenging, but being keen skiers it was completely worth devoting the time and effort into getting them confident at an early age. By the time they were six-years-old, our children were happily skiing down steep black runs - we have to work increasingly hard to keep up with our eldest.

What about instruction for older children?
Beginner's instruction is readily available for older children from resort ski schools. They’re grouped based on how many previous week’s experience they’ve had and / or whether they’ve achieved certain graded proficiencies. Lessons are usually two hours long with a short assessment at the end of a week’s course. There’s always great excitement from our children when they moved up another badge level.

The two most important things for beginners of any age to learn
To ski competently there are two basic things all skiers must master: to stop and to be able to keep in control. Once your children have got those mastered, everything else will fall into place with practice.

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