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How Busy Is Too Busy
By Mommie | November 14, 2008
Extracurricular activities are shown to benefit your child in numerous different ways. They can increase confidence, actually improve academic performance, improve their social relationships, teach them the value of teamwork and achievement, and the list can go on and on. But when is it to much? When are the effects of over-scheduling your child detrimental?
As my daughter entered first grade, the amount of activities that she could participate in skyrocketed. Since the beginning of the year, she’s had the opportunity to be in a school singing group, a running club, girl scouts, swimming, gymnastics, jump roping club, Spanish club, and karate. I’m sure I’m leaving out a few, but you get the picture.
We try to leave the decisions up to her, as I would hate to be forced to go to an activity that I didn’t want to participate in. So far she chose Girl Scouts, gymnastics and karate. Those 3 activities (if we actually did them all) would take up Monday, Tuesday, double duty on Thursday, Friday and Sunday. So is that too much for a little kid to handle?
Absolutely! Kids need down time, but here’s the things moms, so do the parents! Running children to and from activities is hard, not only on the kids, but on the parents as well. They get run down, there’s no fun in that.
We decided to skip Girl Scouts this year, as they had decided on a Friday night meeting time and that’s usually the night we like to relax or go out to dinner as a family. And we also decided to stop gymnastics, in lieu of karate. Our daughter is doing awesome in karate, has been asked to join the advanced classes and now gets private sessions with the instructor. So it reduces it to three times a week. I have noticed her being more tired lately, but we switched her bedtime to a little earlier to offset that.
So what is to much? What do you think?
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Topics: Parenting |
November 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Psst, you can delete this comment but it should say too busy unless you meant to misspell the word. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Lol, if that’s all it took to hurt my feelings, this blog would have lasted about a day! Thanks for the heads up!