Cut Back on Your Child’s Schedule and Cut Back on Your Stress

It’s supposed to be a time for winding down and spending quality time with your family. But once you figure in housework, homework, chores, cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up after dinner, bath time and bed time, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time – or energy – left for winding down, let alone quality interactions. Throw in whatever practice they had that evening, and you’re lucky just to get everyone in the right bed before midnight.

Hectic nights pile into hectic weeks, and hectic weeks zip through hectic months, and then you look around at another new season and wonder what happened to your plans for the last one. What happened to long walks in the evening before winter set in? What happened to sitting around the fire with hot chocolate and a board game before winter was over?

If, between hockey practice, piano lessons and dance rehearsals, your nights are being torn away from you and you’re left regretting missed opportunities for quiet bonding at home, it might be time for an adjustment.

Take a look at your schedule. In any given week, how many of your evenings are spent at practice fields or dance studios? We tend to think that the more activities we sign our children up for, the better off they’ll be. And while raising a well-rounded child is an admirable goal, it doesn’t have to be done all at once.

If your child is concurrently involved in more than two activities per season, you run the risk of stressing out not only her, but yourself. Every commitment she makes requires commitment from you, and not just driving back and forth. More than ever, teams and organizations are requiring volunteer hours and/or services from the parents of its players and members.

For each sport or discipline your child takes up, you must accommodate your own participation into your schedule. Showing support for your child at practices and games and recitals and performances is wonderful and healthy – or it should be. But are you spreading yourself too thin? Are you stressed out to the point of annoyance when your child has yet another fundraising activity for his team that demands your time and attention?

If you have more than one child involved in more than one different activity, is it realistic to expect peace and time to wind down in any given week? Two children with two activities equates to at least four chunks of time during the week and another couple on the weekend. Sports like soccer and football can have two, three or four practice nights a week, followed by at least one game on the weekend.

It’s just for a season, you say. OK, maybe these eight or 10 weeks will be hectic but you’ll figure it out. What happens next season? Soccer overlaps into football, football into hockey. Not only have you set a precedent with your children where they expect to be allowed to do multiple activities, but you’ve set a standard for yourself. When we don’t meet our own standards we invite guilt and feelings of inadequacy, and blame ourselves for letting our children down. It’s a stress-filled cycle.

Raising a child takes 18 years to a lifetime. It’s not done in one year or even two; you don’t have to expose them to everything at once. A well-rounded child is one who is still in development, who is active and inquisitive and enjoys her days and nights in different ways. Remember that quiet activities at home with the family are important to balance out all that time doing drills.
A well-rounded adult draws from a childhood well of experiences that accumulated over time. There will be time for your 5-year-old to do gymnastics, soccer, cheerleading and piano. Your 8-year-old doesn’t have to play baseball, football and hockey all in the same year while maintaining a rigorous martial arts schedule.

Most of our children will not grow up to be great sports stars or stage-stealing musicians, and those who will are more likely to focus on that one special talent than try to maintain an equally high standard in a bunch of them. To what end do we push our children to try every sport under the sun all at once? Why do we enroll them in four nights of gymnastics every week? If you have a truly driven and talented child and you’re working for a future focused on that talent, you are the exception, not the rule.
The rest of us are the rule. As much as our child may love baseball and have a strong pitching arm, realistically, after college the most he’ll probably do with it is co-ed games in the park. That in itself is great; he’ll be making fun and healthy choices for the rest of his life if he takes the lessons he learned playing on a team with him.

Music will also stay with a child throughout her entire life, strengthening her math skills, teaching her discipline, allowing her the pleasure of true appreciation of the craft and its creations.

Extracurricular activities are essential to the growth and development of well-rounded children. However, as with everything in life, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Too many obligations and too many life lessons all at once is too stressful, not only for the child but for you, the parent. Your obligations do not begin and end with driving and volunteering. You have to be able to nurture your child through their inevitable struggles and disappointments; no one wins every game or performs perfectly every time. You have to have the energy and perspective to be a coach and a cheerleader and the bad guy who makes him do his homework first or makes her choose between a piano recital and her best friend’s birthday party.

It’s important to find balance. You can not let extracurricular activities take over your life. Sports, dance and music are all fantastic character-building activities. The lessons they teach in team work, responsibility, independence and discipline are invaluable. The imposed structure your child gets in school, on a team and at flute practice should be balanced with the freeform self-created structure of playing in the yard with the neighborhood kids. That imaginative, creative style of play is just as essential to their development.

Don’t underestimate yourself; don’t forget that you have a lot to teach at home, as well. Whether you’re sharing cooking secrets or board-game strategies, quality time at home with your children teaches them about you, about your family, about their place and role in your family, and most importantly, that they’re worth your time.

Being well-rounded encompasses not just an assortment of experiences, but a variety. Joining a team and learning a musical instrument are important, and the opportunities to do so should be available to every child, but do not limit his experiences to those genres by cramming his – and your – schedule with them. Find a happy balance between the hectic demands of extracurricular activities and time hanging out together doing simple stuff at home. Take back control of your time. Make your every week well-rounded in this way and you’ll find yourself raising well-rounded children.