If you’ve got an active child who gets bored just hanging around the house, check out Samadhi Hawaii’s aerial classes for kids. They might wind up still hanging around, but in a different way.

The classes include instruction on the three types of apparatus: trapeze, the swinging horizontal bar seen in traditional circus; silk, also known as tissu or fabric, which has become familiar in modern circus acts like Cirque du Soleil; and the hoop, which is not offered until children are big enough to reach the edges of the hoop with hands and feet simultaneously.

Nicole Young, a dancer with a background in gymnastics, teaches most of the children’s classes for Samadhi Hawaii, an aerial dance company that performs at festivals and special events. She said the classes appeal to a wide variety of kids.

“The ones that do gymnastics take to it pretty fast,” she said, “but we get all kinds of kids, and some kids can barely hold themselves up when they first start. And so when they do even a couple of climbs they get really excited.”

Samadhi’s class sizes are limited to four kids per teacher. Children as young as 4 are accepted, as long as they show the necessary mental focus. Though Samadhi’s studio has 16-foot ceilings, children are not suspended very high; usually, they can touch ground while hanging from the apparatus.

Young said some of the youngsters in the class, especially boys, notice an increase in upper body strength. At a recent rehearsal for Samadhi’s youth performance group, that strength was evident in 16-year-old Chayton Davenport, an 11th-grader at Roosevelt High School, who shimmied up and down a 16-foot-high stretch of silk easily.

When he was a youngster, his mother noticed how he liked to climb on things and brought him to aerial classes. Still, “in the beginning years, I couldn’t even get a foot off the ground,” he said, but now he likes “the feeling of being high off the ground,” he said.

In nine years of aerial work, he’s never fallen. He particularly enjoys the showmanship aspect. “It’s something new to everybody else, so I might as well bring it to them,” he said.

Another member of Samadhi’s youth performance group, Aiko Yoshikawa-Humphreys, 10, got involved in aerial work through gymnastics. She was working on a routine for an upcoming performance, hanging from a trapeze bar while twirling a hoop on her waist, toes and arms. She enjoys the “creativity” of developing her routines with her instructors, and she has total confidence in what she’s doing up there.

“I’m not afraid of heights,” the diminutive fifth-grader at Punahou School said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “Never have been.”

If anything, the fear factor affects adults more than children. Consider Young’s experience. She is a 40-year-old who came to aerial dance about eight years ago through her work with Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre.

“There’s some conqueringfear for us adults, too,” she said. “What’s nice about aerial is that you have total control over how you hold yourself and how you lock yourself in.”

Parents often enroll their children in aerial work after noticing that they enjoy playing on jungle gyms at playgrounds and schools and want to ensure their children can engage in such activities safely. Many parents wind up setting up the apparatuses at home for their children, though Young suggests they take an aerial class themselves if they expect their kids to do aerial work at home.

“The kids sometimes make it look easy because they don’t weigh anything, so these parents are on the sidelines telling the kids to do things that they have no idea how to do,” she said. “They don’t realize how hard it is.”

Samadhi Hawaii founder Andrea Torres, who has also worked with children, said the courses are designed to acclimate the children to the apparatuses before learning to climb on them. When introducing children to silk, for example, she has them tie a knot in the fabric, forming a cocoonlike pocket that they can climb into.

“We put them sitting, in a position where they’re not using their own strength, but still uplifted,” said Torres, 48. “And then we put them upside down in a position that also doesn’t need much strength at all. We show them how to go upside down in a way that is safe, and then they get used to being upside down.”

She said aerial work builds on children’s natural instinct to climb.

“Children are little monkeys,” she said. “We’re just giving them the platform to develop that which they already have in themselves.”