What happened to just playing after school?
I’m saying no to structured after-school activities for my kids for their sake and my own
There’s always something we aren’t doing, it seems. My school-age kids, who are 7 and 4, bring home shiny brochures every Friday, broadcasting the latest after-school programs all the cool kids are doing: hip-hop, soccer, flag football, drawing, Girl Scouts, horseback riding, clay-making, ukulele. And every Friday afternoon, I allow my 2-year-old to shred the after-school brochures in her hands and relocate them to the trash.
We’ve participated in many of these classes, and they’ve been led by happy, capable teachers. And yet, when the day of any class arrives, I regret that we aren’t just spending the evening at home. The last ballet class my 4-year-old took required a 40-minute drive in rushhour traffic so she could jump over stuffed animals placed in the middle of a room. The ceramics class my oldest daughter was taking at the same time, in the same arts centre, yielded 10 spiky and fragile glazed projects, two of which broke as soon as we brought them home.
Both of my girls loved these classes. My oldest daughter has anxiety issues, and my middle daughter is deaf and has gross motor delays, so I framed these activities as child-chosen therapies that would give them tools they could use outside the classes. And there were benefits: I love their early exposure to the arts; I love the clay projects, and the self-worth that came with them; and I love the glowing pride my daughter with special needs shows when she leaps through the air.
But I need only look at my blood pressure at the end of each class to see the weightier downside of our after-school commitments: The kids are in an unleashed tizzy after a full day of paying attention in school and structured extracurriculars, no matter how much fun they have had. I have nothing planned for dinner; and the traffic has reached a level of insanity.
The problem is that these activities are supplying my kids with lessons they don’t need to learn at this point in their lives, on a strict schedule, and with monthly fees. These activities do them no harm, but they increase my anxiety and limit my mobility, and the hours between 4 and 6 p.m. are a time when I need to place my needs (decompressing after all the kids are home, starting dinner, pouring a glass of wine) ahead of the short-sighted desires of my young kids — a parenting move that feels countercultural in a country that provides cooking classes for toddlers and meditation sessions for those too young to be capable of reasonable thought.
In the 1980s, when I was the age my children are now, I was chiseling the atrophying concrete in our driveway after school, or trying to jump a bike over slabs of wood my older brothers had dragged out from the garage. I wasn’t anxious, and neither were my parents.
But it seems harder to be that kind of fun-loving, casual participant today. Our kids are encouraged to commit to things at a higher level of intensity, farther away from home, at a higher cost, before we can weigh the commitment, commute and money against the rest of the family’s needs.
A lot of us put our kids in activities because other similar-aged kids are doing these activities. But the implied state of playing “keep up with the Joneses” is that we’re pursuing an illusory ideal that exhausts us and that we’ll never actually reach. Maybe even the Joneses are more tired than they seem.
For now, they can enjoy after-school activities like I did at this age: at home.