Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on my ballet parent Facebook groups asking advice on how their kids can “do it all.”  Can they stay in normal full-time school, take honors and AP classes, join clubs, have a social life and train in serious pre-pro ballet? If someone figures this out how to do this please share your secret! Seriously, though, you can do it all but not  all at once.

I had that kid.  She wanted to be involved in a variety of activities and she was taking a heavy course load. Right before high school, Abbey moved to the San Francisco Ballet School and commuted 1.5 hours each way, all while trying to keep up with everything at school and her social life. Despite looking like she was holding it together, she was often tied in knots worrying about everything she needed to get done for school. She also missed her school friends and felt bad about the limited amount of time she could spend with them. It became clear that there just weren’t enough hours in the day and her mental health began to suffer. She began working with Elizabeth Sullivan, a performance coach  who specializes in dancers. We’ll talk about her in more detail in a future blog post, but she had a huge impact on helping Abbey navigate the stressors for serious ballet training. 

As Abbey’s ballet training got more demanding, she had to  make some tough choices. The hardest was leaving her brick and mortar school, and everything that went along with being a normal high school student. In tenth grade, she switched to an independent study program that was offered through our local public school district. This proved to be  the right move for her because ballet was a priority and it allowed her to work on school at her own pace. Ultimately, she was able to finish high school ahead of schedule.  

Your dancer may have a wide variety of interests and may not be ready to let all of that go. That’s okay.  Be sure to have regular discussions about goals and how dance training fits into their world.  When they  tell you what they want, listen. But be honest about what each decision means.

A few questions you may want to ask are:

• Do the teachers at your dancer’s studio think they have the potential for a professional ballet career?
• Are you okay missing high school milestones like prom and homecoming? 
• Can your student handle non-traditional schooling?
• What academic standards do you expect your dancer to maintain to go to a hybrid or online platform? 
• Can your family afford full time training? 
• Are they ready to potentially leave their home studio?

The reality is that to get the level of training needed for a professional career, students have to make some pretty significant changes to their lives usually by sophomore or junior year of high school. This often involves full-time ballet training and enrolling in some sort of non-traditional education, usually online school. 

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Well, my kid is different. They can totally handle everything and stay at their home studio until it’s time to audition for trainee, second company or corps positions.” Maybe. But, it’s unlikely. 

And, data backs this up. According to the Data Pointes Guide  your dancer is much more likely to land a company position coming out of a company-affiliated ballet program. Of course there are exceptions, but the data doesn’t lie.