Getting a Child Started in Golf: The First Six Months

Getting a Child Started in Golf: The First Six Months

Everybody starts children in golf in April, which is the worst month to do it. The courses are busy, the lessons are booked, and a beginner is acutely aware of the group waiting behind them on every tee.

Autumn is quieter, cheaper and considerably kinder. Nobody is watching, the range is half empty, and a child can hit forty bad shots in a row without anybody sighing. By the time the season turns, they are not a beginner any more.

Month One: Do Not Buy a Set

The instinct is to buy clubs first. Resist it for a few weeks.

Almost every club and range has junior clubs to borrow, and a first session should establish one thing only: whether the child enjoys hitting a ball. That question costs nothing to answer and does not require a bag in the boot. Plenty of children discover in twenty minutes that they would rather do almost anything else, and the parents who bought the set first are the ones who feel obliged to keep going.

If they come back asking when they can go again, you have your answer.

Month Two: One Lesson, Not Ten

Book a single lesson with a professional who teaches children regularly — which is a different skill from teaching adults well.

One lesson at the start prevents the two or three habits that are genuinely hard to remove later: a grip in the palms, an over-swing, aiming with the shoulders. It will not make them good. It will stop them building something that has to be dismantled at fourteen.

Then leave it alone for a while. A child who is given a swing thought every Saturday stops playing and starts performing, and performing is not fun.

Month Three: Now Buy Clubs

By now you know they want to play, and you know roughly how big they are.

Buy junior-specific clubs, sized by height rather than age, and do not cut down an adult set — a shortened adult club is heavier, stiffer and thicker in the grip than a child can manage, and it teaches a flat, round swing that a coach then spends years undoing. We have written the full sizing guide separately, and it takes ten seconds against a wall.

Three or four clubs is plenty. A driver, a mid iron, a wedge and a putter cover everything a beginner will do for a year, and a lighter bag is a bag a child will carry themselves.

Months Four to Six: Play, Do Not Practise

This is the part most parents get backwards.

A bucket of balls on a range is a chore. Nine holes on a quiet evening is a game, and a game has a story — the one that went in the bunker, the putt that dropped, the hole where they beat you. Children continue with golf because of the stories, not because their contact improved.

Play short courses. Play alternate shots. Play best-ball with them so a bad hole disappears. Keep score only if they want to. Let them pick the club and be wrong, because being wrong and finding out is the whole mechanism.

What Actually Keeps Them Coming Back

Their own things. A ball with their name on it, a marker that is theirs, a bag they chose. It sounds trivial next to lessons and clubs and it is not — a child with their own kit is a golfer, and a child borrowing the club's spare set is a visitor.

That is the cheapest part of the whole business and it does more work than anything else on this list.

Coming Shortly

The Upswing junior range lands soon — junior clubs built to a junior specification in three sizes, with Growth Kits that upgrade a set as a child grows rather than replacing it. If month three is going to arrive in your house this autumn, it is worth registering for the launch on the range page.

The Practical Bits

Personalised items are made to order, with 1-2 business days of production before dispatch, then standard UK delivery of 3-5 business days. Free over £75, £4.95 under. Made-to-order items cannot be returned or refunded unless they arrive damaged or defective, in which case a photograph is all we need.