Afterschool Activities

When considering activities for your child, it is important consider that we all want to raise balanced children. In order to raise a balanced child, they need to have lived a balanced life. My recommendation is to limit your child’s after school activities to no more than two or three days a week. I believe that this will leave your child enough time to just be a kid, while they are still a kid and can enjoy that. Children learn many of their life lessons through their play, so it is imperative that you give them time to play. In addition to these valuable lessons, there will be many opportunities to have teachable moments with your child about winning and losing, and success and failures. What better way to prepare them for what lies ahead of them in the "real" world.


If your child is extremely talented at a sport and you think that they are headed to the Olympics or to a professional career, that may require a much larger commitment. Be sure that your expectation of athletic greatness is based in reality, before making this kind of commitment with your child. It will be a commitment for both of you and statistically this level of athlete comes along very infrequently.

After school activities are extremely important for your child to participate in. It teaches practical lessons in areas that talking to your children alone can not begin to teach. It helps them to develop a sense of good sportsmanship, builds confidence, teaches responsibility and teamwork, all for the price of one or two nights a week. Finding the right activity or activities for your child may take some time, and I know it did with my own children. Each tried soccer, t-ball, scouts, gymnastics before they both settled on karate. We insisted that they stuck with an activity for an entire season, for two reasons. First, we wanted them to make sure whether this was the right activity for them and that takes more than one or two days to make that type of decision. Secondly, we wanted to be sure to instill in our children that when you commit to something, people count on you to follow through and it wouldn’t b right to quit halfway through, leaving your teammates in a lurch.

My parting word of wisdom on the topic of after school activities has to be BALANCE. Without a balanced life, we raise “lop-sided” children.