Your child, once just a sweet kid, now morphs into a Power Ranger at the mall and karate chops the dog at home. Lately, it seems, the only difference between him and Jackie Chan is the hour of their bedtimes. And this morning, right after a rerun of a Ninja Turtles cartoon, he announces that he wants to take karate lessons. So, are you going to let him?

Although martial arts are hugely popular with kids--some 1.4 million now take lessons--much of what goes on inside those storefront karate academies remains, for many parents, a mystery. Will you have to register your child's hands as deadly weapons? Will he be indoctrinated into some mystical Eastern cult?

We decided to find out a little more. We put our questions to a group of prominent martial arts instructors and distilled their answers to create the dialogue that follows. While we didn't find out how to chop a cinder block in half, we did learn that there's more to the martial arts than Bruce Lee and black belts. Exploring these ancient disciplines, in fact, may be just what your little grasshopper needs.



Gregory Lauzon is a staff writer for FAMILYFUN.