American middle class kids & their numerous extracurriculars!

[Leopardprintonsie]

In the UK we talk about over scheduling kids & effect on mental health etc.. My US relatives (East Coast based Connecticut & New York) kids are in numerous activities to make them "well rounded"..
Lacrosse, field hockey (girls), rowing, basketball, athletics, dance on top of two instruments at the bare minimum. Apparently this is the norm in middle class families where the aim is a top college. All this on top of high grades. The cost alone is staggering. Any U. S mumsnetters want to give an insight?

Couldn't agree more.

Also my Irish middle class nephews and nieces do as many if not more stuff than my american children did. multiple sports, multiple instruments, drama, art, weekly grinds,

That's the difference. I would love my dc to be able to have the choice of afterschool activities.. Ours offers basketball & football...
Private in the town offers yoga, art club, chess, hip hop dancing, music etc... I can't afford it unfortunately.

Lacrosse/Hockey/football/Swim are all seasonal, they would only be doing one sport at a time. Practise doesn't start until just before the season starts.
Instrument for my Ds was weekly at school and he was a lousy at making time to practice. Dance was year round for Dd, but only twice a week after school, not connected to school.

@MrsCarson that's a good point that they're seasonal must make it much more manageable.

No this is not the norm, speaking as the mother of three US teens, two of whom are in top colleges, and one of whom is graduating high school this year.

HTH.

OTOH mine did have to do 60 volunteer hours to graduate HS. They learnt a huge amount from that. DS packs meals for refugees and delivers food from the supermarket to the food bank. That’s totally normal and expected where we live at least.

YUP!

That was true in Connecticut in as well. My son tutored reading/writing for an ESL program. He got a lot out of it. That was a High School requirement though, nothing to do with college apps.

I love the volunteer programs. I hope that wasn't lost during covid.

In Aus private school Saturday sports are compulsory so it's busy.

My kids learn two instruments each (at a high level), are part of chamber orchestras, part of a choir, go to athletics cross country club. One plays waterpolo at senior level and the other squash. They start school 7/7.30 most days.

They fit it all in no issues and also get their homework done and good grades.

We also have time for family as well. It's better than then being on screens the whole time. It's where you want to put your focus.

My DD has her birthday this weekend and to celebrate we are all doing a triathlon (enticer level so not a full one!). That was her choice. Will obvs be followed by chocolate cake (lots of it!).

You don't have to do activities to get into university here. I went to a "public ivy" and got in with average grades and zero extracurriculars.

Bit sad that life is increasingly seen as a choice between "expensive extra-curric" vs "screens" (looking at several of the posts here).

Non-screen family time? Art? Making stuff? Visiting interesting places? Travel? Reading a (gasp) book?

There are plenty of free, non-micromanaged activities that humans can do without staring at a screen. Maybe consider limiting phones and screen access, everyone?

The thing is, the universities know perfectly well which kids have had access to lots of extracurriculars and judge accordingly. If you come from a posh private school, or a well funded public in the suburbs, you're not judged the same as someone who attends a public high school in Southeast DC, or who lives in a small town in rural Kansas where they simply don't have enough children to offer all that.

It can be overly competitive but the problem is less poor kids (they have problems but not playing lacrosse isn't one of them) and more that it's really cutthroat amongst a specific segment of middle class/upper middle class people. the other problem is that the sport obsessed parents start pushing their children into specialisation and highly competitive settings far too early. Children who aren't ready for expensive club competition and want to develop skills get left behind for the big team sports.

My eldest didn't do any sport and she got into both the flagship state campus and two prestigious privates. She did work hard at the extracurriculars she did do--she did service based and academic-competition activities as well as art. The idea is that there should always be some way for a student to shine outside of grades. It could be sport, music, community service, competitions like Mock Trial/Mathletes.

High school runs earlier in most of the US, often something like 7:30 - 2pm.

It sounds quite normal to this aussie! Yes to some sports are seasonal, and ime girls high schools are better at structuring it so you can do multiple ones Ie run different sports comps each term. My 7yo is finishing up athletics shortly and then the football season will start, he also does basketball, swimming, gymnastics and piano, and isn’t doing tennis because there wasn’t space in the class. But we will probably have to drop his gymnastics when we are both back at work in a few months. I expect at high school there will be a few extra things on top of whatever sports he’s doing then and an instrument- choir/band or both, debating I’d hope and probably some drama. That’s what everyone did when we were there and I don’t see any sign it’s changed. They do get downtime too 😁

We do not consider ourselves classless, far from it.

why are you talk about something you very clearly know nothing about ? 🙄

Some dcs in the uk do a lot of extra curricular activities. My dd is very active and has always done many. She dropped some slowly as she got older. She now dances several times a week, rides at a good level, plays netball in the school team, likes a range of sport - private school now so sport is important, whereas at state she showed zero aptitude. She is also learning to ski and is proving to be a natural. Apart from this, she’s also doing D of E silver.

Mom of a DS, Uk born, but US raised. We live in the richest county in the US, mainly due to the taxes raised on enormous data centers. Some kids are ridiculously privileged and do crazy amounts of extracurricular activities. But we live in a more modest part of the county.

My DS is 17 and is in his last year of high school and did rowing (crew) and academy rugby in the fall and winter seasons, now it is rugby and track & field (shotput) in the spring. In addition, he does DECA ( a business club), Engineering club and Investment club at school - those tend to be held once a week, before classes start, around 8.30am in the morning. He also goes to the gym before school, his choice, and then has a job on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons. The only thing that surprises me is that HS sports tend to be 5, 6 or even 7 days a week. I am not used to that coming from Europe and it can be a real challenge.

He has applied to 8 colleges and been accepted to 5, rejected at 1, waitlisted at 1. We are waiting to hear on the final one. His grades are decent, but nothing crazy (not like at A** stuff I hear from the UK) and his common app essay was actually pretty good, I was impressed.

Most of his friends are pretty similar, lots have jobs and do at least one sport. Some do a musical instrument or some kind of theatrical activity. Most do some form of volunteer work throughout the year. My DS is in a club that holds assemblies in elementary schools and talks to kids about resilience and building courage.

I did not know what to expect, but it has been a reasonably positive experience - if you set aside the challenges of him being diagnosed with Autism in middle school. Actually, having the diagnosis and finally understanding some of his challenges was amazing, and the support he got in school was really a game changer.

When I was at school, I did swimming 2x week plus galas, guides, 4x instrument lessons plus a Friday music group plus county music group some weekends, badminton/tennis and netball. This was normal and not frowned upon then!
Loads of my friends did similar too. It was all after school/weekends though, no early starts.

My own kids now do something most nights and at the weekends, as do friends' children (primary school so may be different as they get older). But at the moment, it is absolutely expected that they do all sorts of clubs/lessons!

All of those activities are laid on in schools.

Your child can participate with no participation fee if you qualify for free or subsidized school meals. Schools provide transport to away games, meets, or matches. Basically you get your child to the school in the morning, and after that they are in the school's hands all day. I used to drop DD1 off at 5:30am for swimming practice in swimming season and the same the next season for water polo and didn't see her again until 10pm on meet nights, and 5:30pm on all the other evenings, when they just did before and after school practices.

Teachers are paid a decent stipend to coach sports, to lead a club (French club, astronomy, gardening, big buddies , wheel throwing, etc). DS' gf coaches a sport at the high school she teaches in and is paid 10k annually for this role.

My local schools provide endless opportunities in the areas of sport, art, music (all genres), performing arts, student publications, spoken word, debate, dance, social justice clubs, the list goes on and on and on.

The school made students do a one period study hall every day, when they could sit in a supervised room and do homework, study, or put their heads on their desks and nap.

The public elementary and middle schools offer similar opportunities, in sports, music, dance, theatre, clubs, etc

Oh, and the school day is 8-3 in all schools in my neck of the woods, from kindergarten to the end of high school.

Getting a snow day is unheard of despite winters that are often brutal.

It's all laid on in school.

American free-at-point-of-service public schools are like expensive British public schools.

You don't have to schlep your children anywhere, just drop them off in the morning.

It's worth pointing out that it's really only private universities that look at the extra curriculars and service projects, etc, when considering an application.

State universities require a statement of purpose, iirc - along the lines of 'why do you want to major in physics?''
Your grades are what they really scrutinise, as do the private universities, and they look at the quality of the courses you've taken in high school. A lot of honors and AP courses count. So do your ACT scores for a lot of universities, but not all.

However, it's a fact that attending a private university that offers to meet 100% of the demonstrated financial need of all admitted students can work out cheaper than going to a flagship state school. Not surprisingly, the universities offering this excellent financial aid are the most selective. My state's flagship started offering far more generous financial aid than it used to to well qualified applicants in hopes of keeping talent close to home, raising the stats on admitted student GPA, and in the hope of eventually receiving generous donations from successful alumni. It was easy to see that the best students in the state were going elsewhere, and the flagship was seen as a safety school.

To be fair that does depend on how well things are funded and the size of the school. I've been in parenting groups with people from all over the country, and in rural areas they don't have that, and in some inner city schools too. But it's considered important to offer a variety of things. It's partly about college and the intense competition is aimed at that, but there's also a big push to "get involved" as it's thought to be good for kids to have things to do and a good way to make friends. So you can also see clubs for things like Dungeons & Dragons, computer programming, minority cultures. If you can get a faculty member to agree to be an adviser, and it's not offensive, you can probably make a club for it.

for some activities there's a divide between kids who compete at school and those who do expensive private competitions. Some people spend a lot of money on dance, gymnastics, ice skating, even soccer as there's a lot of private club competition. On the other hand, little league baseball isn't terribly expensive. Big cities also often have rec leagues as keeping kids busy is thought to be a good investment in keeping them out of trouble. Not all high schools have facilities for swimming, but places like the YMCA have competitive leagues. One of mine did fencing privately though we did not get into the expensive sorts of competitions.

ice hockey is a tricky one as there's usually a lot of demand for rink time and never enough available.

When my kids have been prepping during a competition season, they can be staying after school for that every day. But the season doesn't last all year.

Clubs are fairly normal here in mainland Europe also. For teens Volunteering in various things is very common and that becomes your ‘group’ as it were.
Ie the firebrigade is made up of volunteers in most areas bar big cities, so there is fire youth to start ‘training’ from young. 10-16 years. They will have evenings, weekends and afternoons with fun but practical activities similar to scouts. Learn equipment training, combined with activities like climbing or tech stuff nowadays. Most Adults also belong to volunteer groups , so it often runs that families join the same one for generations. They are actually pretty vital to how the country runs.

There’s also scouts, Alpine association, paramedic equivalent, youth stuff, elderly, politics etc etc..

For uni applications almost everyone will be expected to have volunteered somewhere within a ‘verein’ over the years.

Ds is a toddler. We are with the Alpine and fire associations, so he already goes to various events within them, so it’s seen as normal day to day.

Also school finishes at 12pm most days for everyone. So the afternoons are free for activities