Elf Sternberg

Karate classes tend to be, from what I've found, more oriented on competition than on self-defense. Aikido is a purely defensive art, for the most part does not have a competitive aspect (though there are progressions through the ranks via testing), and seems very suited to children. Instead of teaching punches and kicks, it teaches you how to use your opponents attack against him. My son, Jaime (10) has been taking it for about six months now. In that time, he's learned to fall, roll, and flip in such a way that you could basically pick him up and throw him, and he'd land unhurt. He also proved, a few weeks ago, that he is able to roll an attacker onto the ground in such a way as to disable them without really hurting them: one of the neighborhood girls had run up and was hitting him in the back and back of the head with a hand-mirror. Jaime asked her to stop, she didn't, and before my sister, who was watching, could intervene, he grabbed the girl's wrist and neatly and gently rolled her over his shoulder and onto her back on the ground, never relinquishing hold of the hand with the 'weapon' in it, just as he'd been taught in Aikido. I don't know who was more shocked, my sister or the little girl, but she wasn't hurt and he'd easily stopped her from hurting him. Anyway, if you're interested, here's some general information:

http://www.aikidofaq.com/introduction.html

And the website of the school that Jaime attends, so you can see the sort of standards a demonstrably effective school has:

http://www.aikido.org/dallas/

Velvet