Playing as a family is a great way to make memories, but playing with children of different ages at the same time poses its challenges. It’s usually too rough for the little ones or dreadfully boring for the older ones. We’ve come up with a way to involve all the kids (except 1 year old Rosebud) in a fun-for-all game of family soccer.
We generally break the 4 oldest – mom, dad, Carman (age 11) & Sudoku (age 9) – into 2 teams. Those teams play a regular game of soccer with sawhorses set up for goals.
Insert Doodle. He is his own team. His goal is to simply touch the ball with his foot. When he does, all play stops and he gets a free kick at the goal (it doesn’t matter which one.) The team that is on defense when Doodle manages to get his foot on the ball takes posession after his free kick.
Doodle has become more active in our games since we started playing this way. He’s often the winner of our 3 team games.
Thanks to flickr’s Ctd 2005 for this fun photo.
it still seems like it would be difficult to have an enjoyable game for everyone when you have 2 adults and 2 kids. how do you manage that? I’d be afraid that the nine y.o. girl would get hurt or just hang back and not really play.
Thanks for stopping by, Ty. It’s true, Marathon and Carman don’t play all out. The rest of us would either get hurt or just dodge everything. We remind Carman to take it easy, and, perhaps more importantly, we play barefooted. That keeps us all in check – and it’s easier on the grass too. I’ll write soon about other balancing rules we’ve employed in another post.