Two lonely Albury teen parkour enthusiasts have turned to coaching to inspire the next generation and create a local community of people interested in their niche hobby.
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Fourteen year old Owen Robinson and 17 year old Jorge Bevan coached 72 children through skills in parkour, ninja, tricking and obstacle training at yesterday's 'Risky Kids' open day in North Albury.
Jorge said he and Owen met through the Flying Fruit Fly Circus and discovered a mutual passion for parkour, an activity where participants negotiate urban obstacles by running, jumping and climbing.
"[The Fruit Flies] used to have a parkour class, but they don't do it anymore and then we used to go to flip out a lot, but that's since closed down," he said.
"There was a bit more of a community of us then."
Owen said if they wanted to do anything parkour related they had to go to Melbourne.
It felt kind of lonely," he said.
But in November, the pair were presented with an opportunity to create a new Albury-Wodonga parkour community through 'Risky Kids'.
'Risky Kids' teaches parkour, ninja, tricking and obstacle training, to develop resilience in children and families.
Jorge said 'Risky Kids' was fostering a new generation of parkour kids.
"It's really inspiring seeing them being passionate about the same thing we have been," he said,
"Being the only ones doing it for so long and now there's other kids that look up to you and go 'I want to do that as well', it's really awesome."
Risky Kids national director Richard Williams said Albury was the fastest growing 'Risky Kids' location, with 150 kids currently enrolled in the program.
"The community has been incredibly receptive," he said.
"All of the research that we do on young people and risk taking says that there's bigger acceptance of it as you get more rural.
"As you get closer to city centres, people get more focussed on things like finances and position, whereas out in rural areas, it's more about health and family."
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The program teaches children how to take risks safely through learning skills like climbing on monkey bars, vaulting, landing, rolling and how to fall.
"That's a big one, because if you're going to fall you want to be able to get back up again," Mr Williams said.
"Taking risks is OK. We've got a saying: "risky not reckless".
"The whole point is that we want to challenge ourselves and that we want to grow."
Mr Williams said the activities taught children and families to be comfortable with discomfort to develop emotional and mental resilience by measuring success against individual goals.
"Risky kids was built with the goal of attempting to understand and create a solution for the health problems that we see in society," he said.
"The amount of kids who are clinically being diagnosed as anxious and depressed is 80 per cent higher than it was back in the 60s."
Mr Williams said parents, teachers and communities wanted to protect children, but 'Risky Kids' taught that it is important to normalise and teach safe risk taking to kids.
"Those fearful families start to say it's OK for me to let my kids take risks, it's ok for me to let my kids scrape their knees, bump their elbows, even come home from a day upset and hurt and that's ok," he said.
"They'll bounce back and they'll become stronger for it."
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