We sometimes have parents ask us why their child isn’t progressing as quickly as they expected.
One of the first questions worth asking is simply, ‘how often does your child actually have a football at their feet?’
For some children, their ICFA lesson is only one part of the week. They might also play in the garden, kick a ball around at school, take one to the park or spend a few minutes passing with a parent. For others, football happens for an hour on Sunday and then not again until the following week. Those children are getting very different levels of exposure to the ball.
This level of exposure matters because familiarity develops through repetition. The more often a child receives the ball, moves it, stops it, turns with it and experiments with it, the less unfamiliar those movements become.
That doesn’t mean they need another coaching session.
In fact, as we discussed in the article ‘How Much Football Is Too Much Football?’ earlier in this series of articles, we don’t think younger children necessarily need more and more organised football. Often, what they need is simply more opportunity to play.
More football doesn’t have to mean more training
There is an important difference between playing more football and doing more football training. A child can spend ten minutes kicking a ball backwards and forwards with a parent. They can dribble around the garden. They can take a ball to the park. They can play with friends after school.
None of that needs to be organised and it doesn’t need to have a particular outcome.
A few minutes with the ball here and there can add up to a surprising amount of extra experience over the course of a week.
Familiarity with the ball matters. The ball starts to feel less like something they only encounter during a lesson and more like something they are comfortable using.
Once a level of familiarity is achieved, progress usually becomes easier.
Parents don’t need to become coaches
This is probably the most important part of this article. You don’t need to coach your child at home.
You don’t need to correct every touch, explain every mistake or provide feedback every time you play together.
Your child already has a coach during the lesson. At home, you can simply be their parent and during a game you can be their playmate.
If they want to show you something they learned in class, great. If they want to practise it with you, also great. But not every interaction needs to become a teaching moment.
Parents can sometimes feel as though they should always be imparting knowledge, improving something or helping their child learn.
It’s difficult not to fall into that habit and as parents we have all been there, but what we want to encourage you to do is to try to find the joy in playing. This is also your moment to enjoy having fun.
Kick the ball around. Let them try to get it past you. Make up a ridiculous game. Laugh when it all goes wrong.
Football doesn’t have to become another thing that is constantly being assessed.
Football is supposed to be fun
When we first started ICFA, our slogan was simply ‘Football is Fun’. We changed it later, but the idea behind it never really changed.
Football is a game. It should be fun for children to learn and fun for them to play. And actually, it should be fun for parents too. Something that we’ve noticed over the years is that many of the children who seem most engaged with football are also the ones whose parents seem to bring a lot of enjoyment into it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean practising more or knowing more about football.
It could just be a parent who is happy to kick a ball around, make up a game or let their child try something on them.
That sense of enjoyment is contagious.
If football is something the family enjoys together, then it becomes part of ordinary life rather than something that only happens during a lesson.
Borrow ideas from the fun game
If you are wondering what to do with your child, one of the easiest places to get ideas is simply to pay attention to the fun-game section of the class.
Our sessions are generally divided into a warm-up, a skill section, a fun game in the middle and then a game at the end.
The fun game is often where imagination comes into it most.
One of the games Coach Morgan uses is Sharks and Fishes. The children are trying to move with the ball while avoiding the sharks. He will sometimes use his imagination and if you listen during the game the ideas get very far-fetched including crocodiles, dinosaurs and all kinds of fantastical beasts and the youngest players love it.
You can do this at home too! You can be the monster and they have to stop you getting their ball. The ball can become treasure they have to protect. The sofa can become a castle. A line on the floor can become a river. You can become the dragon, the shark or whatever else makes them laugh or makes them actively protect the ball.
From your perspective as an adult, they may be dribbling, turning, protecting the ball and changing direction. To a four-year-old, they are escaping from a monster.
That changes the whole feeling of the activity.
Young children don’t need every activity explained to them in technical football language. Imagination gives them a reason to move, react and keep trying without feeling as though they are doing an exercise.
You don’t need to reproduce the class game exactly. The useful thing is to notice how easily football can become imaginative play.
You don’t need a garden or a set of goals
A lot of our families live in apartments, so we are certainly not assuming that everyone has a garden, a big patch of grass or a set of goals outside the back door. You really don’t need much space.
On a wet Amsterdam afternoon, a soft foam ball and a few metres of floor can be enough. You can pass the ball backwards and forwards. Your child can stop it, turn with it, move it from one foot to the other or try to keep it away from you.
You can make up a target or a challenge.
It doesn’t have to look like training to be useful.
If you do have a garden, of course - use it. If you can get to a park, even better. But you don’t need to go out and buy lots of equipment before your child can enjoy playing football, sometimes a ball and another person are enough.
Making a little room to move
Homes with children are rarely completely tidy for very long, and that is probably realistic. Especially in winter, there are going to be days when children are inside more than usual.
The weather may be poor, getting to the park may not be practical, or everyone may simply be at home. On those days, it can be useful to make a little room for movement.
That doesn’t mean letting children kick a hard football around the living room.
It can be much simpler than that.
A soft ball and a small cleared space can give a child the chance to move, play and use their body even when going outside isn’t an option.
Children live in our homes too, and sometimes that means accepting a little movement, noise and disorder.
It doesn’t need to be a training session.
Sometimes it is simply a way for them to move their bodies, play for a while and enjoy the space they have.
A soft ball makes indoor play much easier
If children are going to play indoors, a soft foam football is a much better option than a normal football.
Something around 15–20 cm in diameter is usually enough for passing, turning, dribbling and simple games in a small space.
A few inexpensive options include:
- Decathlon Kipsta foam ball
- SoccerConcepts soft football, 20 cm
- Lobbes Mondo soft football, 20 cm
A little common sense goes a long way indoors. Use a soft ball, clear a small area and be particularly aware of sharp furniture edges or anything a child could fall against while moving around. You don’t need children taking shots at the television or the new vase you got for Christmas so maybe move the valuable stuff ;)
Passing, turning, dribbling and imaginative games work perfectly well in a surprisingly small space.
What we learned during COVID
During the COVID lockdowns, there was a short period when we couldn’t hold normal sessions outdoors due to lockdowns so our coaches created simple videos for parents so children could keep playing with the ball at home.
What was interesting was that during that period we realised how little equipment was actually needed. We found that our players could practise quite a lot with a ball and a very small amount of space even though it wasn’t ideal.
Once organised children’s sport was allowed to continue again, we returned to running our sessions, but that period was a useful reminder that football doesn’t always need a pitch.
A lot of useful play can happen in a garden, on a pavement, in a park or in the middle of the living room and it’s important to remember this when we might end up stuck indoors due to inclement weather, illness of family members or factors outside of our control. We can always adapt ourselves to the conditions we find ourselves in.
The important thing is exposure
Children develop familiarity with the ball by spending time with it. That time doesn’t all need to happen in a class. It doesn’t all need to be coached.
And it certainly doesn’t all need to be serious.
If your child enjoys football, give them opportunities to have a football around. Let them play with it. Let them show you things. Let them invent things. Join in sometimes.
And don’t worry too much about whether every minute is educational. The learning will often happen anyway.
Perhaps the simplest way to help a child become more comfortable with football is also the most obvious one: let them play with a ball.