Sports, music, drama, art, languages, Lego club, choir, scouts, dancing, chess, first aid. These are just some of the extracurricular activities that parents might consider signing their children up to do, as the new school year approaches.
Activities don’t come cheap and it’s an already expensive time of year for many, but we have to offer children the opportunity to learn new skills and get active, right?
Couple that desire to offer children opportunities to try new things with the guilt and fomo (fear of missing out) as WhatsApp groups ping with notifications of parents scrambling to see who is doing what activity this year, and it’s no wonder we can find ourselves totally overcommitted.
But are cost and parent taxi-duty commitments the only things we need to consider?
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Or are we doing more harm than good when we sign them up for lots?
With school providing “so much learning in a certain way”, extracurricular activities can be very important to children, explains Bethan O’Riordan, psychotherapist and host of the Mum Mind podcast. It offers them a chance to “meet different friends, learn different skills, a place to let it all out. Having a varied life is often what really helps a child to thrive”.
Which leads us to the age-old question, as we try to provide that varied life – how many is too many? “This depends on your child, who they are and how their brain works”, O’Riordan says. “Some children can keep going and others need more rest.” The type of activity also matters, she explains – “how much stimulation [activities provide], and in what kind of way they do” is a consideration.
She offers the example of learning to swim. “Probably a very good extracurricular activity to have, but it could be absolutely exhausting mentally and physically for a child, so that could take up the space of two or three [activities], even though it’s only one activity.”
O’Riordan feels it’s important activities don’t take from family time. “It’s a parent who raises a child. It’s us as a parent who helps our child become who they are, so if a child is away from the parent for loads and loads of different things, it’s almost a distraction from the relationship that the parent needs to build with the child”, she says.
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“We don’t want children to be overwhelmed,” but she cautions “we want our children to fit in. And fitting in is belonging with your family first, and if after-school activities are becoming a distraction from that, well that’s something to pay attention to.”
What about children who prefer not to be in activities or can’t get involved in any of them. Is this problematic? O’Riordan says again it depends on the child. “For a lot of children, school is an enormous amount of mental and physical work.” Even having to sit still takes huge effort, she explains. “Listen to your child. Do they need more?”, she advises.
Of course, once the activities have been chosen, there’s always the risk of the novelty wearing off and a child deciding they no longer want to do it. And parents are left with the dilemma of whether to make them continue with it or allow them to give it up.
Making a decision on what to do here depends on whether or not there’s a theme, O’Riordan explains. “It’s okay to take breaks from things, but also you’re the parent,” she says. “It’s your job to make sure they have a full and balanced life. And if they’re just stopping an activity to come home and sit on a screen, that’s something that would concern me.
“We’re up against it as parents and we have to make their life outside of the online world more exciting than being in the online world.”
Pressures change when children transition to secondary school, and the temptation to drop activities to accommodate these demands and pressures can grow. However, secondary school already encompasses many activities, O’Riordan points out.
“They’re actually under a lot of pressure, and they themselves might not think they are. But they do an enormous amount of work these days, whether it’s academic, whether it’s in their activities, and having down time is really, really important.” O’Riordan says she sees teenagers “bordering on exhaustion, because they’re being pushed in so many different ways”.
“Remember, learning to rest is a real skill, and we want to help set up these young adults with this skill. They may have a passion, they may have a drive, but we have to really carefully help them curate that and cultivate that, alongside helping putting their wellbeing first.”
Parents also need to be careful to ensure their own internal fears and anxieties about their children not reaching their potential don’t cause them to push their children too much, O’Riordan says. She suggests that when deciding on activities parents ask themselves: “Do I want my child to do that activity for me, or for them?”
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