Let’s Dance: Exploring the Physical, Psychological, and Social Effects of Dance in Children

Movement and dance have a lot of positive health benefits, physically, psychologically, and socially. Children love to intrinsically move and creating a structured dance program is one way to gain the benefits of dance. The purpose of this study is to explore the physical, psychological, and social effects of dance in children while gaining insights that could be applied to the setting of occupational and physical pediatric therapies. This was done by conducting a literature review and exploring how children react to learning and following dance videos in a classroom setting by evaluating ability, engagement, and enjoyment by creating Let’s Dance, a virtual dance program with stretching videos and upbeat active videos. 100% of children were able to complete all the videos. Children were more engaged with the videos of stretching with ballet and the upbeat active videos. Children more enjoyed the upbeat active videos when compared to the stretching based videos. Overall, children were able to complete the videos while staying engaged and enjoying the program. It can be inferred that children gained physical, psychological, and social benefits from participation in the program. Future studies are needed to examine the results in a larger and more diverse population