WHO DOES THE CHOOSING?

• Who should take the initiative in deciding what activities to pursue, lessons to sign up for, or teams to join? It’s best if the desire comes from your child.

• You have a tremendous influence over your child’s activities, even when just suggesting a particular hobby or sport to your child.

• Sort out your child’s skills and talents from her passions and interests.

• Consult your child before making commitments to classes or activities. Gauge her level of interest, and clarify what appeals to her the most. Is it that his best friend’s taking the class along with him, or that he inherently enjoys the activity itself?

• Evaluate how many of your child’s activities are initiated by her, and how many been chosen or insisted upon by you. You also have to factor in the age and temperament of your child in order to figure out where it’s best to draw this ever-shifting line.

• It’s easy to end up micromanaging your child’s choices because you feel responsible for her success.

• Staying deeply involved in every detail of your child’s life prevents her from learning to structure her own schedule and find a personal balance between activities and downtime.

• Motivation to engage in an activity will likely change as your child gets older. In preschool and early elementary school years, most children sign up because their parents want them to.

• For your under-5-year-old, you may need to guide her choices much more than you will for her at age 9. If you want an activity that helps broaden your child’s interests, think about those that push her ten percent against the grain. If your child is not naturally inclined to do anything athletic, find an activity that gets her active without forcing her into competitive, strenuous activities she views as tortuous.

• The motivation then shifts at age 8 to activities they intrinsically enjoy, ones they are good at, and ones where they can be with friends.


FOLLOWING YOUR CHILD’S LEAD

• In order for something to ultimately become a passion for your child, it has to be of her own choosing. Even as a preschooler, your child will likely have ideas and instinctive reactions about whether she finds something engaging and interesting.

• When your child makes her own decisions, it forges stronger character development than when you are the one running the show. Children acquire self-reliance and resilience through making mistakes and getting beyond them. In order for your child to develop a strong sense of herself, she has to feel not only free to fail, but to experience failure and move beyond it. The message you send your child when you choose is that she lacks the ability or maturity to make responsible or thoughtful decisions on her own.

• Your child will start having very strong opinions and want to make her own choices between ages 9 to 12.

• Plus, as your child reaches puberty, any prior acquiescence to your activity suggestions or preference often comes to an abrupt halt, and she may promptly decide to drop the activity altogether. To get past this phase, the drive and perseverance has to come from your child, not you. If she selects the activities in which she wants to participate, she’ll be more likely to stick them out.


PRIORITIZING & GOAL-SETTING WITH YOUR CHILD

• Ask any child under age 8 about the score in a game, and even those tracking it will get it wrong most of the time. There will be games your child’s team loses handily only to have your child declare it an all-out victory, as she really has no idea of the score unless debriefed by an adult. For this age group, it’s all about the fun, the excitement, getting to participate, being with friends, and building new skills.

• What motivates you to have your child participate and what motivates your child may be vastly different without you even fully realizing the disparity. What do you want your child to get out of the activity in general? Try this exercise of categorizing and prioritizing activities with your child: each of your rank activities your child wants to do on the following rating scale, from 5 to 1, with 5 = indispensable to you, and 1 = indispensable to your child.

• It is also important to set meaningful and attainable goals with your child. Concrete goals help because they allow your child to work towards something and enable her to monitor her progress along the way. Goals should depend on age, experience, and skill. Goals could be, for instance, getting in at least three-quarters of first serves in a tennis match. Clarify what your child hopes to gain from participating and support her in her own goals.

• Realize that your child’s goals may change throughout the years. It is also important that these goals are not set in stone and that there is some wiggle room. In the long run, it’s not natural ability that will keep your child playing and improving, but a sense of accomplishment and joy.

INSISTING ON CERTAIN NON-NEGOTIABLE ACTIVITIES

• Parents clearly fall into two camps on this issue of forcing your child to pursue a particular activity or sport. Some are totally opposed, while others either care passionately about an activity, such as music being an integral part of their family culture, or consider an activity fundamental, such as learning to swim.

• There may be some things you consider either fundamental “life skills” such as knowing how to swim, or something very important to your family that you feel essential for your child to know, such as learning to ski for family ski trips or learning to play a musical instrument.

• Forcing your child to continue an activity she doesn’t enjoy turns it into a control issue, and you risk having a deeply resentful, willful, and rebellious child on your hands. When you make your child do something she does not want to, you will endure endless glares, sullen pouts, and occasional tantrums.

• On the other hand, there are countless stories of athletes and musicians who feel grateful that their parents forced them to take or stick with an activity, and stories from fellow adults who regret either never having tried an activity at all or having dropped out.


LIMITING THE NUMBER OF SIMULTANEOUS ACTIVITIES

• Ice skating, hockey, children’s theater, soccer, ballet, modern dance, chess club, French lessons, piano lessons, swimming...”Gotta catch ‘em all!” as the Pokemon mantra admonishes our kids.

• It would be great if there was a simple, uniform answer to the question of how many activities to allow, such as one sport, one musical instrument, one language, and call it a day. Instead, it’s a constant dilemma that reappears each time seasons change, a class comes to an end and you have to decide whether to re-enroll, or so on.

• There are some, albeit a few, parents who pull their kids from all organized activities, but they are clearly the exception. For the rest of us, we do not want approach activities in such an all or nothing fashion. Activities in moderation can offer tremendous benefits, from physical exercise to helping your child develop hobbies and passions.

• Yet you do need to set limits. Just as you don’t allow your child to gorge herself on ice cream after dinner, you cannot say the sky’s the limit for activities after school. While each sport or activity can be worthwhile in and of itself, they become overly stressful and time-consuming in the aggregate.

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH

• Often, your child is as conflicted as you are concerning how much is too much. Despite sighing about having to trudge off to a class or activity, being tired, or evidencing signs of the pressure, your child may at the same time tell you how much she likes the various activities she does and how she doesn’t want to drop any of them.

• Our culture sends you powerful messages that to be a successful modern parent, you should keep your child constantly stimulated. Yet you can’t let the constant drumbeat of this message drown out the cues from your child about what works best for her.

• While an activity or sport can offer your child a different skill or aspect of personal development, in the present they can be overwhelming, stripping your child’s day of free time and putting her under enormous pressure.

• If your child wants to add an activity and you think she’s overloaded, ask her to consider giving up one current activity in exchange for the new one.

• Urge your child to slow down, and talk over what should come off her schedule.

• Try to limit your child to one competitive sport a season, given the time commitment practices and games usually entail, so you do not find your entire weekend absorbed with carpooling and spending too much time in the bleachers.


YOUR ACTIVE CHILD WANTS EVEN MORE ACTIVITIES

• Many kids would book themselves up every spare moment if they could. Just because your child wants to spend her every waking minute filled with activities doesn’t mean you should facilitate this or allow it. With this child, your challenge is to ensure a balanced schedule, preserving some downtime each day.

• What if your child does twelve things a week, seems to be thriving in them, and handle the commotion just fine? It’s like living on a diet of Oreo cookies: your child may still be growing, but it’s ultimately not nutritious. For this child, the challenge will be teaching her how to become self-reliant and self-entertaining in free time.

• Monitor your energetic child to make sure she does not overextend herself.

GETTING YOUR RESISTANT CHILD TO TRY SOMETHING NEW

• Fear of the unknown or of failure often keeps children from trying new things.

• Drawing the line between activities your child initiates and those you push is key.

• You may find yourself with a reluctant participant when it comes to activities. Your child may balk at activities that require physical exertion or risk-taking, or shy away from team-event or competitive situations.

• You may need to help your resident couch potato develop a healthy and fit lifestyle. Your challenge is to find ways your child enjoys being active.

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