How to Avoid After-School Activity Overload!

After-school activities are seductive. They are promoted in their most attractive light whipping your child into their groups with a boundless enthusiasm that this is the best possible use of their time. Peer pressure adds to this, your child wants to do band because his best friend is, and all the cool kids play football, and he wants to go to the swimming club, and so on. It's all very exciting. New stuff, new team members, but reality will soon set in as with each uniform/equipment list comes the schedule for the semester that shows how little time for a real life outside of school your child will have.

You have two options here, you can accept the schedules as you silently count up the amount of quality time you'll have with your child, wonder if you'll ever get to talk to them outside of the car, and worry about when their homework is going to get done. Or you can take the schedules, and discuss them with your child.

It's not going to make you popular parent of the year if you make your child choose one or two after school activities from the original four or five they'd planned, but unfortunately, as good as being popular with your child makes you feel, parenting isn't about being popular. It's about doing what's best for your child at a time in their life when they aren't able to separate desire from feasible. Allowing your child to do the four or five activities may make them happy in the short-term, but by the time they've spent a couple of months not having time to breathe, let alone play on their computer, they're going to start feeling overloaded and noone is going to be happy in the home until some kind of a compromise on time management and after school activities is reached.

An ideal solution is to have no more than two or three school nights with one after school activity. If there's a weekend implication – as with many sporting activities which have practice through the week and games on Saturday or Sunday – then there should be no more than two nights involved. This way, your child will get at least two nights at home to catch up with family time, focus on their homework and connect to their siblings and outside of school friends instead of constantly rushing from activity until the next from morning until bedtime every day.

Try to choose the activities that won't conflict with scheduling, and which will allow your child to develop a broader skill base – for example playing a musical instrument plus a sport. If your child isn't happy with the situation, offer to negotiate. If they do the two activities now, and they keep up their grades, and they still feel they have time to take on a third activity come the following semester, then you'll consider it. That way you aren't closing the door on what they want to do, but you are putting some unsaid ground rules into play. It's very possible that by the time the first semester ends that your child will have either lost interest in one of the activities they start with, or one that they had on their wish-list, or that they can see how little time they'd have for other things if they had to commit more after school time to another activity. If they still feel strongly about a third activity however, and they've maintained their grade level, then you could commit to a third activity on a trial basis – one that is only one night and no weekend commitment if there's already a weekend commitment – to see how it goes with the condition that if you think their health or grades are suffering, they'll have to stop.

After-school activities are a great way for children to network and develop new skills, but they can be demanding on both time and energy. You know your child better than anyone, including them, so even if your child refuses to talk to you for a week, at least you'll be sure that you aren't allowing them to overload their lives with activities that can have a negative impact on their health, family life, and education.
 posted by Jane