Are there any riders over 40 with children here?

No kids but confidence has taken a serious nosedive.

I get so cross with myself when I think what I used to do - I'm about to embark on a course of sport hypnotherapy to see if it will help.

My horse is an absolute treasure and would do absolutely nothing to harm me - so why am I so scared?
 
I think it's probably normal to suffer from some sort of enhanced survival instinct once you become a mother.

It does wear off over the years, I guess, by which time you're like me and starting to realise that the next time you fall of you'll probably break your hip. Adds a bit of edginess to it all when you reach the wrong side of 50!
 
I was never very brave and perhaps that's why my confidence on my horse is pretty good. I don't take unnecessary risks but we definitely enjoy ourselves. However, I went back to riding after my youngest reached 3 years, and I just find it keeps my sanity intact (up to a point!).
 
Perhaps it helped in some odd way, that for the first 6 months of owning my horse, I fell off continually in non-dramatic ways and found that my body did still bounce.
 
I'm 33, recently returned to the horse world over the last 18-24 months. I have a 7yo son.

I've never jumped - that is something I really want to try, but I also haven't fallen off for over 17yrs, and the thought of it scares me silly! Remember 15.5 of those 17 years have been horseless....I still get up top though, so far have only hacked out in walk and trot, cantered once or twice (I was all over the place!) but it's a start I guess. Hoping to get some lessons under my belt this summer to improve my riding and therefore my confidence. DS has a very passive interest in horses - take em or leave em - He too has only done walk and trot, though he did instinctively sit a buck/spook/fart wonderfully well last summer, so there is hope for him yet :)
 
42 and mother of five between 17 and 6. Have to say I'm not as brave as I used to be , but that very probably was caused by a particularly nasty cartwheel over a XC fence which piled me head first into the ground . A combination of horse's unshakeable belief in his own invincibility , and my bad judgement of exactly how fast we were going . And worse I did it in front of the two eldest who were about 4 and 6 at the time .

These days I confine myself to doing the worlds fastest dressage tests :D
 
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