✅ Self-confidence. Any sport helps you shape your sense of self as a kid. But if you’re piloting your own boat at eleven years old? You’re in a different category.

✅ Teamwork. Whether you compete in regattas or simply boat with friends, boating helps you develop better communication and social skills.

✅ Weather knowledge. There are crucial pieces of knowledge we teach our students when they get in the water. Knowing the weather is one of them. This is useful knowledge both in the water and on-land.

✅ Responsibility. When you take the helm, you are responsible for the choices you make. I’ve only seen this type of responsibility being developed when children get their driver’s license.

✅ Patience. If you’re taking part in a Regatta, often you’ll have to wait a while until the wind conditions are right. Patience is also developed when you’re showing up daily to build your skills—as is the case with boating.

✅ Vision. There’s an interesting trait I’ve seen developed in children who boat. They get to balance the small details of their current surroundings, with the big picture of the entire lake or racecourse. It’s stunning to watch. In real life, this translates to being able to have long-term goals while taking short-term action. (Add the previous point, patience, and your kid is prepared to make you really proud when he or she grows up.)

✅ Resilience. First you have physical resilience, which comes with the physical exercise boating provides. But then you also have mental resilience, which comes by sailing on not-so-friendly conditions, preparing for a regatta, or managing a larger boat with a team.

✅ Spatial awareness. I’ve noticed that kids who boat also make for great, responsible drivers when they grow up. That’s because boating teaches spatial awareness by navigating through narrow spaces, avoiding collisions, or coast to a dock.

✅ Life skills. Many pursuits can give you what I call “life skills”. These are traits you get from one pursuit that’ll help you in any area of life. Through boating, you cultivate confidence, physical and mental strength, patience, decision-making skills, and responsibility.

✅ Energy expenditure. Many kids nowadays spend the whole day watching TikToks or playing video games. This is understandable because they don’t have a pursuit that really excites them. But with boating, we’ve seen kids and teens come to the boathouses, exert themselves throughout the day, and come home to tell their adventures at the dinner table, sleeping early to do it all over again the next day.

These are some of the many reasons why kids should boat.

But don’t take our word for it.

Instead, bring your child or teen to Regatta Point, have them take place in a few of our classes, and see how they experience these benefits firsthand.

? Take your child or teen to the boathouses