If your DC do lots of weekend extra curricular activities, what events are important enough to miss them?

[potentialqualms]

This is causing some friction in my usually very laid back extended family.

My Dc are teens now but when they were younger I felt that weekends were for spending time with family and didn't arrange extra curricular stuff for Saturday or Sunday. This was easy enough for us as they both hated sport so football etc was never on the cards. They did Swimming, Cubs and music lessons which could all be arranged during the week.

My DSis' children do everything. Often 2 activities per evening in the week and a full programme at weekends. It sounds exhausting to me but obviously that's up to them. Where it does start to cause problems is for me is any extended family get-togethers, which have to be arranged around this programme. e.g. DGM has a big birthday coming up and would like to arrange a weekend or even a day out with all the DGC, but it can't happen because of all these activities. We all live several hours apart, so it's not easy to just do something in the evening. DGM doesn't ever ask for much but this is upsetting her. She has in the past driven several hours to babysit for all of us and has stayed with DSis for a week at a time to provide emergency childcare. She gives far more than she takes IYSWIM.

If your DC do have busy lives what kinds of events are big enough to miss their activities?

[NataliaOsipova]

I hear you. My older and wiser friend always had the following rule: "Family first, school second, friends and other stuff third". Which I think pretty much sums it up! There's a bit of a balance to be had, in as much as if kids sign up to do a weekend activity, then there's some merit in saying they can't duck in and out as they please and they need to honour that commitment. On the other hand, I feel (as you do) that something like this genuinely comes first....and I'm sure that a) it's easy enough, as others have said, for them to pick a weekend that isn't the one of the show/exam/big match or whatever and b) the person running the club would entirely understand if it were explained to him/her that the kids would be going to their grandmother's significant birthday. So I think your sister is being unreasonable here.

[potentialqualms]

Yes, that's it exactly Natalia. e.g I told my DC they could chose whether to be a Cub or not but if they were going they had to go every week. The only things I let them miss for were school related (although probably family things never came up on a Weds night!). So, I understand that once you've committed you have to go, but they're so committed there's never time for poor DGM.

[AmberEars]

I started a thread a bit like this recently. The overall consensus seemed to be that it depends on both the importance of the social activity and the importance of the sporting fixture. It certainly wasn't a clear cut decision one way or the other.

In this case a big birthday for Granny ranks pretty high, so I think you are right, but at the end of the day it is their decision, not yours.

Do the weekend activities stop for half term?