Helping Your Child Pick The Best Extracurricular Activities

With the wide variety of extracurricular activities available at most school what's the best way to pick which ones for your child to participate in? Which ones are they going to get the most out of both on a fun level and on a looking towards the future level? Should we let our children choose their activities strictly on their own or should we offer our own input and guidance? These are the kinds of questions that we ask ourselves as parents when our children start being old enough to participate in activities outside of school. The answers to these questions can have a long lasting impact on how our children develop and should be taken very seriously. It's very hard not to step in and take the decision completely out of our children's hands after all we're the parent and think that we must know better due to our much vaster experience and knowledge. However, this is not always the best solution and can lead to great resentment and poor performance in the activity from the child involved. A much better approach is to be involved in the decision making process giving guidance and advice but also letting the child have the major say in the issue. After all it's them that will participating in the activity not us.Start by contacting the school and finding out what activities are available at your child age and grade level and what's necessary to participate. This is an important first step because your child may not be aware of all the things that are offered at their school. It might surprise you exactly how much variety is available and can be a bit intimidating but remember that your child won't be participating in all of the activities only the ones that they choose and you agree to.Next sit down with your child and ask them what activities they are interested in. Have the list of activities with you during this conversation so that they can see what exactly is available and what is involved with each. This will help them make a more informed decision. Talk about the pros and cons of each activity and exactly how much time each one will take. It's also important to talk about the amount of commitment required so that they understand the seriousness of signing up especially for team activities where the members count on each other. Don't scare them away from the activity but make sure they know all the things involved. Once you've looked over all the activities it's time to start narrowing down the list. There are going to be some activities that your child has absolutely no interest in and it's best to get those out of the way before continuing. Once you have a smaller list it's much easier to go through and decide which ones to participate in. One way to narrow the list further is to ask your child to rate how interested they are in each activity and then narrow the list down again by removing the ones that they are only kind of interested in. This should hopefully make your list much smaller and easier to manage. Go through it again and talk about each activity and why they want to participate. Try to gauge which activities they really seem the most excited about and narrow the list down to those activities. Now it's time to figure out which activities your child will have the time to participate in. Take a sheet of paper and make a schedule of the week marking out the time that is spent in school. Look at what's left and this is the time available for extra curricular activities. Ask you child how much of this time they want to devote to activities and remind them that if they fill their schedule too much they won't have any free time. Debate the merits of each one with them but in the end it's going to depend on what they think they can handle and what you think they can handle. Try to reach a compromise. At the end you have a schedule of activities that should be possible for your child to participate in and still have time for homework and rest. Make sure to watch out for overloaded schedules but other than that follow your child's lead .
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