Why you should let your child ride.

To a horsey child, ponies are more gorgeous than Harry Styles, more fun than a day at Alton Towers, and more exciting than Bonfire Night. To a non-horsey parent, they’re giant smelly furballs with too many teeth, hard hooves and an unpredictable outlook on life. So when your child bounces downstairs one morning and announces with an excited glint in their eye that they’re desperate to learn to ride and please please please will you get them riding lessons, you can’t be blamed if your heart sinks a bit. 

Of course, every parent wants to protect their child – and yes, horse-riding, like most sports, carries a degree of risk. But the truth is, riding lessons teach so more than just how to master rising trot or pop over a jump. Learning to ride is a wonderful, life-changing experience for a child – and here’s why:

Bonding with the pony. 

There’s something magical about riding school ponies - they have children clamouring to groom and pet them before their riding lesson. And once the riding lesson starts, that bond gets even deeper – nobody ever forgets the pony that teaches them to ride. 

Of course, it helps that riding school ponies are saintly creatures that love being fussed over and will happily stand for hours while 12-year-old girls plait and re-plait their manes and brush them until they gleam – if only your child was quite as fussy about the state of their own bedroom!

Making new friends.

Riding schools are brilliant places where everyone mucks in and helps each other. It’s irrelevant what background you’re from or what school you go to – none of that matters when you’re grooming a pony together or encouraging each other over a 60cm upright. All you need is a shared love of ponies, and the friends-for-life happens automatically.

Mastering new skills.

Riding isn’t easy. People who say “oh but the horse does all the work” have never attempted to persuade a stubborn riding school pony to canter on the right leg*. Of course, as with any other sport, some people are naturally better at riding than others – but the great thing about riding is that you don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it. It’s just fantastic fun – after all, what could be more fun than horsing about (pun intended) with your mates?

That said, when your child does master a tricky transition or gets a good mark in an online dressage test, it’ll be like all their Christmases came at once. There’s not a feeling in the world that beats a brilliant riding lesson. If you could bottle it, you’d be rich!

Falling off.  

Everyone falls off when they’re learning to ride – hell, even top riders like Zara Tindall and Ben Maher regularly fall off their extremely expensive and highly trained horses! Falls can be unnerving for the non-horsey parent, but they go with the territory – and importantly, they teach resilience and determination. As your child clambers back to their feet, shaking bits of the arena surface out of their jodhpurs, their riding instructor will catch the pony and help them back onto it – and the child will learn that there’s nothing in life that they can’t overcome. When things go wrong, you don’t give up – you crack on, and this time, you succeed. It’s a life lesson that’s worth its weight in gold.

*If you don’t know what this means, ask your horsey child!