Our Approach to Extra-Curriculars
For two and a half years starting when Claire was an infant and Robbie was 3 years old, my job required me to work on-site for at least a few hours most Saturdays during the academic year. Like so many other families with two working parents, we don’t get a lot of quality time together during the week, so losing even a part of Saturday made the weekend even more precious to us.
Because of that, Jon and I have never been eager to sign our kids up for extra-curriculars. We don’t all get home until 6pm so after school activities weren’t an option until this past spring, when we didn’t think the consequences of a disrupted routine on a school night would be too bad. (Robbie had 45 minutes of ice skating once a week at 7:15pm for six weeks.) And the weekends… well, as you know, we like taking a whole day every weekend to get out of town and have an adventure!
Plus, Jon’s done some work with colleagues who study our country’s broken youth sports system and, while we do want our kids to love being active and would be happy if they fell in love with a sport, we don’t want to get sucked into the up-or-out world of commercialized children’s sports.
But/and Robbie has always wanted to try different activities, so the agreement we made was that each kid could choose one sport per season and, beginning in first grade, would do two years of piano. (We actually did start Robbie on piano a few years ago and he really liked it, but we didn’t have time during the week to practice - see: not home until 6pm, and until this past year we tried to start bedtime at 7:30 - and that wasn’t fair to anyone.) Robbie’s done soccer, gymnastics, t-ball, and ice skating. He wants to do karate this year because some of his friends have done it, so we’ll give it a try.
Claire is desperate to do ballet. We haven’t signed her up yet because all the classes up to this age are Mommy and Me, and I just have no interest in participating. But she’ll start this fall and I am so excited for her!
So there we have it: our approach to our kids’ extracurriculars. Look, who knows what we’ll do if Robbie or Claire shows a real aptitude for a sport and wants to pursue it intensely. But that’s not something we want to encourage at these ages, so we’ll not worry about it unless or until we get there.
