My kids are not involved in one single extracurricular activity. Not one. Granted, they are only four and three years old, but I don’t know of a single other 5 or 4 year old kid who isn’t involved in something.
It makes me a little nervous. My husband is unemployed and I have just started substitute teaching, so there isn’t a lot of extra money floating around our bank account. But our kids weren’t in anything before he lost his job.
In fact, one summer of ballet for my daughter is all that we’ve ever done. 8 ballet classes. I signed her up for summer ballet because there is no recital and there is no way in hell that my daughter is going to wear makeup for a recital. Other moms that I know are taking their pre-schoolers to soccer, gymnastics, music, art, dance, martial arts, even basketball (basketball!)
Our kids get their enrichment from Blues Clues computer programs, playing whiffle ball with Dad in the back yard and endless Tom and Jerry reruns. Okay, so maybe that doesn’t count as enrichment. I vascillate between guilt over this, “shouldn’t they be involved in something?” and ambivalence, “They are only 5 and 4, for chistsakes!” My husband is squarely in the ambivalence camp. His argument is, “What can a four year old learn about soccer, they just run around out there.” Kind of like our feeling about Disney, which is that they won’t remember it until they are at least five years old, so why waste our money now?
I kind of think about Tiger Woods starting golf lessons at three, not that I really care if my kids become professional golfers, or professional anything for that matter. But I am aware that kids absorb like a sponge at this age, and wonder if we will regret this later. Before I had kids I was absolutely against activities, as a teacher, I would hear parents complain about “running their kids” from the minute that they picked them up in carpool until 7:00 at night, grabbing dinner at the McDonald’s drive-through and rushing home to do homework and go to bed. To me that was ridiculous and appalling, how can a kid be a kid if they are scheduled all of the time? Where is the play and the fun? And what is the woman’s life like who is essentially an unpaid taxi driver? And how can a kid swim for two hours straight? How can a kid swim for two hours straight five days a week? Swim team was always the most brutal of the activities, in my mind. from the time that one of my fourth graders told me that he went to swim team practice from 5:30-7:30am every day of the week, and when I asked what his mom did when he swam he said that she just “sat there”. Well, what else are you going to do at a natatorium at 6 o’clock in the morning?
As a 30-year-old single teacher without kids, I thought that his mom must be out of her mind. As a 40-year-old mom who worries about what I’m “supposed” to do more than I wish to admit, who lives down the street from a world-class swim club with a daughter who swims like a fish, I can see that it is probably my fate. Not that I’m looking forward to it.
