Dd is 18 and is in her third week at university. She seems really happy so far, but every time I get a phone call from her, she tells me some new thing she’s signed up for.
She’s going to be tutoring GCSE students at a nearby struggling school twice a week, she’s signed up for the ‘Undergraduate research journal’ to be part of a team conducting a research project, she’s joined the committee for the Labour society (and has already volunteered to do leafleting and canvassing for an upcoming council by-election) and she’s taking a campus job to take prospective students on tours. She also does the orchestra and the choir.
She has form for this - she was always dashing around between different commitments at school as well, and tiring herself out, while refusing to drop anything.
Would I be unreasonable to suggest to her that she doesn’t need to do this many things - that she’d be better off choosing 2-3 things that she really wants to do in addition to her studies, and focusing her efforts on doing a really good job at these things, rather than spreading herself so thinly and possibly detracting from her studies?
Or is it a lesson that I should leave her to figure out for herself?