If you're a parent with a golfing child a good short game area should become your best babysitter. It can be so easy to kill two or three hours just chipping and putting and I promise your child will be thrilled to have the freedom of being left alone at the golf course. It’s how I fell in love with this game, I didn’t grow fast enough to keep playing baseball so I switched to golf. Luckily a municipal course had opened near my home and it had a great practice facility with a huge putting green and its own short game area. At 14 I would ride my bike to the course with a backpack full of golf balls, two wedges, and my putter across my handlebars. I would throw in my headphones and spend hours just chipping and putting. This was a great way for me to spend my time because; for one I was having fun practicing, and secondly, having no adult supervision at 14 is a peak feeling.
Why was I able to spend hours working on my short game? Because I treated short game as an art form to experiment with. I wasn’t hitting 50 chips to the same hole over and over again. Instead, I would toss balls all over the area and try to get them as close to the hole as possible. When I would start to get bored I would make the shots more ridiculous; by forcing myself to be creative with how to get a ball close I would refocus while pushing the limits of my skill level to new heights.
The key to developing a junior's short game skills is by letting them be creative in their practice. Successes and failures in practice are overrated, especially for a junior; what really matters is whether they are pushing their skill levels. Challenge your junior to get up and down from behind a bunker and let them fail at it. Failure leads to frustration, and if harnessed correctly that frustration leads to experimentation, and experimentation either leads to failure and repeating the cycle or it leads to true growth. By experimenting, failing, and trying again until they find a successful path your junior will learn far more than just how to hit a flop shot over a bunker. And most importantly they will love doing it.