After-school activities

Before I was a mum, and when Rosemary was younger, I always used to marvel at parents who sent their children out to numerous after-school activities. I thought it must be exhausting for them – and for the children, too. I swore (you know, in the same way you swear you’re never going to feed your children chocolate or crisps or let them watch more than 10 minutes of TV a day) that my children would keep extra-curricular activities to the bare minimum and probably none in the first year or two of school.

The thing is, I think I must have assumed that the parents were forcing the children to do these activities in some kind of child-prodigy-raising, tiger-mum way. I thought that the children would much prefer to be sat at home reading books or baking cakes with their parents than shooting around from school to class, to Brownies and that it was positively cruel to be forcing them to do so much.

But it turns out that those children probably wanted to do all those activities. Their parents were probably having to limit them to a few a week, rather than the two a night and five on the weekend that they’d like to do. They hear about their friends’ ballet classes, pony classes, gymnastics classes and cubs and they want to have the same fun and see their friends after school. They love doing things outside the home and find classes and clubs and so on an exciting change from sitting at home in front of the TV or being jumped on by younger siblings.

So, as it turns out, Rosemary is adding another week-day class starting tomorrow. She’s not doing a huge amount, but it’s definitely getting busier. She now has drama class on a Wednesday, swimming class on a Thursday, ballet class on a Saturday and usually (general) swimming on a Sunday. There’s usually at least one after-school playdate in there, as well, often two. And probably at least once a month there’s a birthday party at the weekend, too.

OK, so it is quite a lot, isn’t it? And we’re limited by classes and activities we can get to on foot (or by public transport, but there’s not really time to go anywhere by public transport after school and get home at a reasonable time). If we had a car, she’d probably at least be doing gymnastics as well. She’s wanting to go pony-riding – we’re hoping to fit a day in over half-term and there’s pretty much no way she could do an after-school regular pony ride, so that’s about all she’s likely to get for a while (phew!).

She loves them all (well, we’ll see if she loves the swimming classes, but she’s very excited about them, at least) and I think gets a lot out of them, including socialising with a different group of children and receiving instruction from different adults. They each teach different specific skills, as well as all-round (you know those hideous transferable skills that you always have to talk about on college applications and CVs) skills. If she stopped enjoying them we would absolutely not force her to keep going. And I’m sure she’d love gymnastics, Brownies, music classes, tennis and whatever else came up, but obviously there are only so many hours in a day!

But… it is tiring. And it’s difficult to fit everything in once you start adding after-school activities in. We were a bit late eating dinner this evening, for example, and she didn’t get to bed until gone eight and she only managed to read half of her reading book. We’re going to have to swap back to doing the reading book in the morning when she’s more alert, which will mean doubling up, as Eleanor will not let her read to me in the morning at all. (Though she is happy for Rosemary to read to her, so maybe we can work with that, somehow!)

What do you think? Do your children do lots of activities? Do you find it hard to fit everything in? Are they too tired? Or do you still have that to come, and look at the list of activities Rosemary’s doing and think ‘Oh. My. God. What is wrong with these people?’ Did you do lots of activities as a child? (I did trampolining, swimming, gymnastics and drama, but I was home-educated and they were there for socialisation as well as the actual classes. I do remember really enjoying them all, but was always exhausted after swimming.)