How the Wave Project offers struggling teens a surfing lifeline

Footballers talk about “work rate”. “My parents were despairing of me ever doing anything useful.” By the second or third week a child suffering from long-term mutism started talking to his surfing instructor, asking for advice An occupational psychologist told him that all the work he had been doing had been “objective”, whereas his personality was naturally “subjective”. “Mindfulness was not a thing then, but it was mindful.” open image in gallery Joe Taylor: ‘We weren’t trying to fix anyone – we were just going surfing’ Taylor had to spend a couple of years convincing sceptical people that the beneficial effect was real. The evidence showed that, after a solid dose of surfing, Joe Taylor’s insecure, stressed-out teenagers with challenges shot up the “Rosenberg self-esteem scale” and the “Stirling children’s wellbeing scale”. “For the first time in my life I’d done something that was bloody useful.” Surfing had changed his own life as well as that of the young people in his charge.