Forging mental resilience with a skateboard

Before a child successfully lands an ‘ollie’—the most basic jump in skateboarding—they must, on average, fall hundreds of times. Hundreds, not dozens. The board slips, knees hit the concrete, ankles twist, yet they remain standing, readjust their foot position, and try again.

The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Singapore began researching skateboarding not because of its inclusion in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but because of the process of falling and rising itself. They discovered that the repetition of physical failure occurring before competition, rather than during it, is the core element that distinguishes this sport from almost all other sports known to children.

While gliding on the board, a child’s brain is not at rest. It processes many things simultaneously: how the body should lean, how hard the feet must press, when to jump, and how to land. All of this occurs in less than a second, repeatedly, during every training session.

This repetition forms new connections in the brain. Every time a child fails and tries again, their neural pathways grow stronger, to the point where movements that previously required intense concentration eventually flow automatically, much like riding a bicycle.

Two systems in the body undergo intense work rarely experienced in other sports. First, the balance system in the inner ear, which constantly detects the direction and speed of body movement. Second, signals from muscles and joints that inform the brain of the position of every body part, even without the need for visual confirmation.

When these two systems are intensely and repeatedly stimulated, they have been proven to help calm the nervous system. For children with ADHD, whose brains struggle to find a point of calm, skateboarding provides the precise stimulation needed to achieve that state.

What makes these findings even more interesting is that the part of the brain regulating balance is not just about balance. Research from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, published in the journal Science in 2019, proved that the cerebellum—the part of the brain at the back of the head previously thought only to manage motor coordination—has a direct pathway to the brain’s dopamine centre.

Dopamine is the chemical that makes the brain feel satisfied and motivated. This means that every time a child successfully lands a trick after dozens or hundreds of failures, it is not just a feeling of joy that is triggered; their brain is literally retraining its motivation system.

The most unexpected finding came from a child services agency in Canada. Hull Services in Alberta handles children experiencing severe trauma, violence, neglect, and behavioural disorders. This institution utilises a neuroscience-based therapeutic approach developed by psychiatrist Dr Bruce Perry, which is based on the simple principle that the brain develops from the bottom up.