There’s this old show, a Britcom called Coupling. It’s a relationship and sex comedy mostly centered around the courtship and eventual marriage of two characters. It’s a solid B+ as TV shows go, but the very final moments stick with me. The last episode of the show happens while the couple is in labor with their first kid, and it ends with the father saying that he looked into his baby’s eyes and became somebody else entirely.
It sticks with me because it’s true. Becoming a parent changes everything…including our relationship with martial arts. For one thing, as parents we don’t have as much time to train as we did before. Beyond that, our reasons for training and the parts of training that are most useful take on a dramatic shift.
I started my show Safest Family on the Block as part of my mission to maximize what I knew about self-defense and safety that would keep my kids safe. From some of the experts I spoke to, and my own experience in the “lab of life”, here’s what I think are the most important things to focus on in our training as parents.
1. Situational Awareness
This probably comes as no surprise. Seeing danger coming in time to avoid it entirely is far superior to having to apply our self-defense skills. This was always true, but let’s be honest — ask our skills build, the desire for an excuse to use them also builds. More than one black belt ignores awareness because they’re “tough enough to handle it.” As parents, that idea goes right out the window.
If you google Situational Awareness, you’ll find the Cooper Color Codes, people telling you to stay on high alert, and phrases like “head on a swivel.” This is good advice, but has a serious problem for parents like us. Those concepts were developed by soldiers and police, for use by people who had a mission (which would end) or a shift (from which they could clock out). Staying in Condition Yellow is exhausting.
As parents, our shift never ends. Our mission is (hopefully) over after 18-21 years. You can’t keep that kind of alertness up for that long. Rory Miller recommends shifting the paradigm. Instead of being on “high alert”, stay mindful and curious about the world around you. Keeping that habit will alert you to potential danger (whether that’s a bad guy, a car moving too fast down your street, or a lego left on the living room floor), and also let you spot beautiful and interesting things to share with your kids.
2. Falling Skills
The last time I was in a fight that didn’t happen while I was either in a ring or working a shift was 2003. I’ve fallen down twice this year alone, and last year I fell down with a kid in my arms. Fact is, knowing your breakfalls and making them an automatic part of your body’s response to a slip or fall is arguably the single most important self-defense skill you will ever learn.
This is true for everybody, but goes double for parents. We find ourselves walking with our hands full, or carrying an unbalanced load, far more often than we did before we had kids. The consequences of a bad fall impact more people. Sometimes, we fall when we have to protect not just us, but somebody else, too.
If your art covers falling skills, great! Get some extra reps in, and start to practice them outside the ideal environ of a matted dojo floor with no obstacles in your fall path. If not, invest some time and tuition at a judo, aikido, or gymnastics school. Some parkour schools also teach this skill.
3. De-Escalation
I use this self-defense skill almost every day, though I haven’t used it against a potential bad guy in a very long time. Like with situational awareness, de-escalation lets you resolve potential violence by avoiding it. These are the communication skills, body language, and visible confidence that help you tell a potential attacker that you’re not worth the effort. Although not all sports martial arts programs teach it, all self-defense programs should include substantial training on this. Even Chuck Norris has a non-zero percent chance of dying in an actual fight. You survive all the fights you avoid.
As parents, this is hugely important. Our job is to get home to our kids. But it goes beyond that. The same communication skills that help you de-escalate a confrontation with an angry drunk, aggressive panhandler, or potential attacker work equally well on toddlers having a tantrum and teens who can’t believe you took away their phone.
Self-regulation is key here, too. When you’re de-escalating a potential attacker, some of your success relies on your ability to stay calm, not take verbal bait, and maintain an even demeanor even under stress. It’s amazing how much of that is also true of negotiating conflict with our kids.
4. Stance Work
This comes into play in two ways as a parent. The first ties into something I said earlier about falling skills. As parents, we’re walking without hands full and carrying unbalanced loads more often. Sometimes, that unbalanced load is a child. Working on our stances helps keep our footing stable, our balance sure, so we can navigate wet surfaces and snowy driveways safely whenever we need to. That’s the easy part of this.
The other, and harder part, is thinking about stances and movement in the context of being a parent. How many techniques do you know that would have you step right where your kid would be likely to stand if you were approached in a parking lot? Almost no martial arts training prepares us to deal with that second person in our space.
What I’ve been doing, and I recommend for others, is to start modifying your stances to include dealing with your little ones. Take a standard ready stance: bladed position, feet at specific angles, hands up in a defensive position. Practice entering that position while using your rear hand to guide a child behind you, for example. It alters some of the basics of your style, but I respectfully submit those alterations are useful and necessary.
5. Fitness
Can we be honest with each other for a minute? At least 80% of martial arts training in North America amounts to a really, really fun group fitness class with some cool philosophical elements attached. Even hard-core, effective civilian self-defense rarely gets used, so even if you trained seriously for combat the benefits never happened on the street.
And you know what? That’s a good thing. The goal of self-defense as a parent is so you can survive long enough to meet your grandkids and spoil them enough to annoy your children. For most of us, a suicide bomber, active shooter, armed robber, or armed assailant isn’t what will get in the way of that. It will be heart disease, diabetes, or a preventable accident…the exact sort of thing good, regular fitness will help use avoid.
It’s not the sexiest thing about our martial arts training, but then again neither was practicing your front thrust kick ten thousand times. Not sexy doesn’t mean not important.
Honestly, these skills are among the most important even if you’re not a parent, but there’s something about being responsible for these tiny lives that underscores why they matter so much. The great news about it all is that most martial arts programs teach all of these. You just might have to raise your hand in class a little bit more.
For more information about these skills in action for parents, please consider checking out my show. For example, this episode here features a Verbal Judo expert teaching me how to apply that system to communicating with recalcitrant children and teens.
- Why I’m In Love With Breakfalls - July 7, 2023
- Five Ways Parents Can Make Time for Training - May 3, 2023
- Travel Safety from a Martial Point of View - October 11, 2022
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