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Because it's what we do

(Editor's Note: Colleen Dunn Bates is the author of "Mammoth From The Inside: The Honest Guide to Mammoth & The Eastern Sierra." You can order the book from REI or Amazon. This article first appeared in the December 2005 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine.)

She was sprawled flat on her back midway down Sesame Street, her little arms spread-eagle and her snowboard straight up in the air.

"I can't get up!" she shrieked.

"For God's sake, Emma, stop screaming!" yelled her dad, who was about 50 feet downhill from her. "Just roll over and GET UP!"

Snowboard rental: $30. Condo for the weekend: $1,300. Teaching your child to snowboard: your sanity.

Or that's the way it can seem. And yet on any given day, the mountain is filled with happy gangs of parents and older kids. How did they get there? How did little Tyler and Sasha learn to ski without Dad having a coronary and Mom hitting the bottle?

To find the answer, I went to two of the finest professionals at Mammoth: Patti O'Donnell Dawley, kids' ski instructor, and Amy Louisa, kids' snowboard instructor. Between them they have 27 years of experience, and their former pupils are ripping up runs from Mammoth to Mont Blanc.

When They're Ready

Louisa believes that a lot of tears and stress could be avoided by not trying to get kids on a snowboard too soon.

"Snowboarding requires a lot of fine muscles in the ankles and feet," she says. "When a child can ride a bicycle without training wheels, then they're ready to try snowboarding."This typically doesn't happen until age 6 or 7.

Younger ones can get competent on skis, but if your family skis only occasionally, be aware that the muscle memory required to remember how to ski doesn't kick in until around age 6, so you might have to reinvent the wheel a lot.

The Fear Factor

When a kid gets really scared on the mountain, you're sunk. Only one thing will head off terror before it takes hold: trust. If your child trusts you, his fear will abate.

"Kids don't always know how to talk about what they're afraid of," says Louisa.

"So I really work on building the relationship first -- I ask a lot of questions and get them to talk. Once they trust me, they feel safe."

Dawley echoes that advice, adding that fun is a great way to build trust. "Once they're having fun with you, they feel safe, and the fear goes away," she says. Keying off what your child says will help you create a fun environment.

"Let's say the child loves ‘Star Wars,'" says Dawley. "So you make your lesson into a space adventure around the mountain. Then, for instance, when you want him to keep his skis more parallel, you tell him to make his skis like a sleek rocket ship."

Also essential, urge both women, is to take baby steps. Taking a 7-year-old who's proud of having just conquered Broadway straight up to Cornice will destroy whatever trust you've built. Instead, practice Broadway until she has it down pat, then move to an only slightly more challenging run, like Stump Alley.

The Four Basic Skills

Dawley says the essential skiing skills are fourfold: balance, turning your feet, edging and pressuring. Balance comes with practice, and turning the feet isn't hard to teach. The real challenge is edging and pressuring.

"Kids don't understand the physics of it," says Dawley. "So you have to experiment so they can learn by feeling it."

Instructors do that by having fun on different sorts of terrain: banks, pipes, tree trails and, of course, little jumps. "Jumps are great for learning these skills," says Dawley. "Plus, kids love them."

Louisa says the biggest hurdle for learning snowboarders is mastering balance while you're on a moving object.

"A lot of great athletes, like runners or tennis players, don't have that," she says. Riding bikes, skating and scootering are all good ways to acquire that skill, so help your kids with those activities before their first time on a snowboard.

Bring in the Troops

Both instructors feel strongly that a parent should not be a child's first ski or snowboard instructor.

"Time and time again parents start teaching their own child, then they give up and bring them to us," says Dawley. "They're amazed at what we can do in a few hours."

This is not always because the instructor is a better teacher than the parent -- you can be the world's best skiing teacher, but you're also the one person in front of whom your child feels comfortable melting down. The typical child will hold it together for a relative stranger. So for the first few times on the snow, use the pros. Once your child is ready to tackle the slopes without an instructor, try to swap kids with
friends -- so you take Uncle Mike's kids, and he takes yours.

Also, advises Louisa, ask your child's instructor about what skills to work on and which runs to explore.

For instance, she says, "skiing parents don't always understand that a flat, green run can be much more challenging and frustrating for a new snowboarder than a steeper blue run."

Accentuate the Positive

What would you rather hear if you were having a lesson?

"Don't flap your arms around like that!" or "Put your hands out in front like this."

No one likes to hear negative statements, yet we make them constantly. "I'm always hearing parents say,
‘Don't look down,'" says Louisa. "Instead, say, ‘Look at that cloud over there.'" Being negative is a tough habit to break, she admits: "I think in ‘don'ts' all the time, and then I have to translate them into positives."

What one skiing mom has learned

God knows I've had my share of slopeside meltdowns. But today I have two joyfully skiing teenagers. Here are a few things I learned along the way:

* This was your idea. Never forget that teaching your kids to ski or snowboard was your idea, not theirs. I've never heard of a 4-year-old who, out of the blue, started begging to spend a whole day in ski school.

* Treat it as an investment. Accept that much like the contribution to your 401(k), family ski trips with small children are an investment in the future. A family of four can easily spend $400 a day, not counting the condo. There will be days, perhaps many of them, when you will not get $400 worth of enjoyment out of that investment. But in a few years, when you're ripping it up with your teenagers, it will pay off handsomely.

* Take lots of breaks. After years of pigheadedly refusing to stop to feed my kids before what I viewed as an acceptable lunchtime, I learned a lesson from my friend Tom McHenry. He's the most gung ho ski dad I've ever seen, able to convince scared 11-year-olds that they can ski Climax and then getting them down it happily. One of his secrets is that the minute any kid in his charge says she's hungry or tired, he says, "Great! Let's get a churro!" He knows that when their tanks are properly fueled and they get rest breaks, kids are far less likely to whine or demand to quit.

* Plan to play. Young children learn and experience the world by play. Skiing and snowboarding might be play for you, but it's not for them -- it's a sport they are supposed to learn to make their parents happy. Play is making a snowman, building a snow fort, or playing snow princesses. Seven hours of skiing, followed by a beer, dinner and bed, is your idea of fun. So quit early, give them time for snow play, and get out there with them for a sled run or snowball fight.