Getting kids involved in extracurricular activities is beneficial for building confidence, social-emotional awareness, physical fitness, and reducing risky behaviors during the teenage years. However, it’s also important that families strike a healthy balance between “being” and “doing.”
Recent research also emphasizes that children need unstructured time for resting, playing, using their imagination, learning to problem solve, and engaging more naturally with their peers.
So, while there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how much is too much when it comes to extracurricular activities, we can offer some guidelines for determining what’s right (or not) for your family.
Striking a Healthy Balance Around School Sports & After-School Activities
As pediatricians, we focus on the well-being of our patients and their caregivers. So often these days, we notice how busy and – as a result – tired many families feel when we chat during appointments. And, of course, the more children you have, the harder it becomes to juggle the calendar, transportation, financial obligations, and the energy required to attend each child’s games, recitals, or other milestone extracurricular events.
Rather than focusing on a specific number of activities, pay attention to these indicators when determining the number and types of extracurriculars that make sense for each child – and your family as a whole.
1. Your level of fatigue, resistance, resentment, or burnout
Let’s face it, as parents, we hold a lot on our shoulders with work, relationships, financial obligations, personal interests, and then Parenting with a capital P. It’s essential to remember that you are the captain(s) of the family’s ship. A positive family culture depends on parents who are feeling relatively stable in their own lives.
So, the first question when determining how many extracurricular activities make sense for each child is to assess what you can reasonably facilitate for them without feeling overly stretched or burned out yourself. This may vary from year to year, or season to season, and that’s okay. Be honest with your children, letting them know that right now there’s enough family capacity for each child to do one thing if that’s what’s needed.
Remember: Modeling healthy lifestyles begins with you. Also, significant aspects of social-emotional intelligence involve honoring others’ feelings and learning to cooperate and collaborate with loved ones and friends to support the whole. So, your honesty is a very healthy thing in the long-term trajectory of your child and their interpersonal relationships.
2. The child demonstrates signs of overcommitment or overwhelm
If a child feels overwhelmed or isn’t in a “good fit” activity, it will wear on them, and the signs will be obvious. Some of the most common signs that something needs to change include:
- They are constantly tired, or they’re regularly falling asleep at school, in the car, or before their normal bedtime.
- Regularly making excuses for not wanting to go to practice/meetings/activities.
- Struggling at school as a result of being overtired, overwhelmed, or not having enough time to keep up with homework or assignments.
- Unexplained physical symptoms like headaches/stomach aches (often a sign of anxiety or mental/emotional distress).
- Losing interest in things they used to enjoy.
- Elevated anxiety.
- Flat out refusing to go.
Remain curious and invite them to be open about their feelings. In some cases, you may learn that the issue isn’t that they are doing too much, but that they aren’t doing the right thing activity for them. Allowing children to explore various interests when they’re younger helps them to find the right activities for their interests, talents, and personality type.
3. There’s never any downtime or time for independent activities
Throughout the week, aim for time for the family to spend time together, whether unstructured or planned, but that’s outside the extracurricular routine. In fact, “balance activities with rest and relaxation” is #3 on our list of simple steps to create healthy lifestyle habits for your kids.
If you’re finding it’s impossible to do things like going for a family walk around the block, playing games, or having movie nights together, odds are the calendar is overbooked. Perhaps it’s time to sit down as a parent/caregiver team or as a whole family to talk about what you can let go of to lighten things up.
4. Balance who is doing what
Again, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to determining how much is too much in the extracurricular world, but here are some strategies for creating more balance around who is doing what. All of these depend on things like your work schedule, how many children are in the household, the availability of other adults or carpool teams that can help with transportation, finances, and your children’s personality types and interests.
- They/you answer “no” to one of the following questions:
A quick way to assess whether a child is overdoing it is to answer the following questions honestly:
- Can you still get all of your homework done?
- Are you able to get enough sleep each night (8+ hours).
- Do you have enough time for healthy meals and snacks?
- Are you able to spend a little unstructured time with friends/family each week?
- Are you happy with our current family schedule?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then they are doing too much.
- Consider starting with one activity per child and assess from there.
We live in a culture that tries to say busier is better, but that’s simply not the case. Your children have many years to explore their interests, so it’s possible that activities should be limited to one per child. Starting with this model can be helpful, particularly if you have more than one child. It gives you a chance to see how it’s feeling – and how the family unit is doing.
Remember, life happens, so you want a schedule that still feels relatively manageable when someone is sick, when there’s a particularly busy time at school/work, or when someone in the family is having a rough week or month.
- Balance one physical and one creative activity.
One way to balance things is to have each child do one physical/athletic extracurricular and one creative (music, theater, arts, etc.). Then, do your best to align back-to-back music lessons or recreational sports that practice in the same park/gym to lessen the load of travel time.
PANW Pediatricians Are Happy to Help Your Family Assess the Doing/Being Balance
Are you struggling to find a balance in your family between doing and being? Are you or one of your children feeling overwhelmed? Or are you feeling like your family can’t keep up with its schedule – even though others around you seem to do far more (hint: they’re probably overdoing it!)? Bring it up at your next well-child appointment or schedule a visit with your PANW pediatrician through the Patient Portal.
As part of your objective, community supporters, we can listen to how you’re feeling, check in on what the calendar is looking like, and talk to your kiddos about their experience. Together, we can help you strike a healthy balance between work, school, and extracurriculars that support a positive, connected family culture.
