To ask how parents manage after school activities when both work full time?

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Loads of brilliant after school activities near us, from the essential (swimming lessons) to fun extras (theatre, coding).

But, myself and my husband both work full time and currently our primary aged kids are in the mediocre after school club until 5.30pm.

How do similar families manage to get their kids to activities? Is the only answer an after school nanny? It's going to be very expensive for someone to pick them up from school, walk with them 10 min to an activity, wait around and then walk home with them again. Or is there another solution?

I'm seeing most of their friends doing all this great stuff because they have a parent working part time, and I'm feeling bad they are missing out.

It depends on whats on offer in your area.
we have a nanny due to the needs of our youngest but most of their activities is still handled by us.
Nanny takes my son to piano class at 4pm once a week but the rest is us normally. Judo at 6pm or later for my oldest, drama at 5.45pm, scouts is 6.15pm beavers and 6.30pm cubs, dance at 6.15pm etc. They have a couple of things at the weekend. Both DH and I have flexible enough jobs so we can work around things if needed so husband takes one of the girls to music classes (free with the local authority) which are for like 3 hours on Wednesday afternoon. He goes there and just works whilst waiting for her.

Like others said it’s weekends or later start times, Friday is an earlier finish for me so we used to have swimming then. My dd’s guitar class starts at 7:10 (it used to be 6:30)

We have a nanny who takes them to after school activities. Granted it’s not a solution that works for everyone.

PTA in school ran a really good programme of ECAs in school 4 afternoons a week - sport (hockey, soccer, basketball, Gaelic, athletics), Irish dancing, tap dancing, choir, music (orchestra, guitar, piano), book club, chess club, gardening club, and others I forget now. So it was possible to sign up to do some activities after school and join the afterschool club on the grounds after those. Except hockey was offsite - so carpool once every 3 weeks and I'd mind 3 kids from 4:30pm to 6pm that 1 afternoon off. (5th afternoon was dedicated to allowing any religious instruction classes as it was a multi denominational school so no religion classes during school time - any group of parents could set up classes within school but in reality it was just catholic instruction).

Our local Scout group has 2 Cub packs - 1 runs on Wednesday night (7:30-9pm) and the other on Saturday morning.

There were loads of sport options at weekends - dd did Gaelic, Cubs and sailing on Saturdays (she dropped Gaelic around the time she started sailing) and hockey and coder dojo on Sundays. I know there was also a cookery club Saturday afternoons, and an athletics group on Sundays. There was a drama school that had both midweek and Saturday morning classes. And we used to see girls in ballet gear locally on Saturday as well. And various swimming lessons.

There were lots of things available outside school midweek that dd could never do. But she tried lots of different things for a term or 2 in school and a good few she did all the way through school. She did swimming lessons for a few years until she was confident but she wasn't interested in competitive swimming TG! She did lots of different sports but also tried an instrument, enjoyed chess, and dabbled in a couple of other non-sport options.

Our area has plenty of SAHM families or local DGPs to help out etc. But also lots of 2 working parent families - and lots of those were also volunteers at the various clubs at the weekends to make sure they were available.

We both work full time over 4 days so both have a day off in the week, on those days DS is picked up at 3:15 and taken to swimming and gymnastics. His school also offer an excellent after school provision whereby every day there is a club after school mostly with an external provider, 3:15-4:15 sports, drama, there is also school choir etc, and after school club offers what they call ASC late which is 4:15-5:45 so the activity leader takes those children to the after school club after the activity club has finished and you can collect them any time up to 5:45 and they are given a light tea, it's £7 with the activity clubs paid for separately. So DS now does a sports club on two of the afternoons and either goes to ASC Late or if one of us is WFH or locally and is able to start early and finish early (both have some flexibility but not consistently) we pick up at 4:15 direct from the activity. Our ASC also allows cancellation to to 15 minutes before it starts and you don't get charged for that session, so if work changes and one of us can suddenly pick him up we cancel ASC and do that.
it takes some foresight and organising but works well

We don’t! And our children are perfectly fine 😁

We just have to pick activities that start at 6pm or later.

As a single parent, this was something my child missed out on a lot.

I would try and do after school clubs and then use the wrap around care but the wrap around care usually finished quite early and so for most of her childhood I had to use a childminder who wasn’t able to take them to clubs.

Instead I tried to do clubs on the weekend, even if it’s just once a week and a block of it to see if they enjoy it or not.
So I’d sign mine up for swimming lessons Saturday mornings for 6 weeks and then changed to something else.

It does mean your weekends revolve around the kids clubs but I found there wasn’t many alternatives.

I did find a parent who was willing to drop ours off to a club on a weekday and then I picked them up and dropped them home, which worked really well for a while but then her hours changed and had to stop.

After school nanny is our only option, but also if you find a miracle childminder who is willing to do school pick up then drop your child at an activity and you do the pick up from the activity. We had that for a while and it was the dream until she retired and not been able to replicate.

Working from home to enable a quick pickup and drop off from school to activity. Sharing drop offs with another kids parents. Taking advantage of before and after school activities that are based in the school grounds- my daughter's school offers football, basketball, netball, music lessons and choir either before or after school hours.
All activities that start a little bit later from 6 p.m.

Should've said ds is 5 so the clubs available to him are more sports and music based as well as Lego engineers, y2 up there are lots of others coding, debate, glee club, creative writing, school newspaper etc.
There are also loads of weekend clubs available locally plus evening cubs, beavers etc and then seascouts and coastguard cadets which DS has his eyes on for when he gets to 11! At the moment we try and keep weekends free for family time, he just prefers to be in an activity vs basic ASC in the week, although he does go one day a week the day his best friend from nursery goes who is in another class so he likes that.

Swimming at the weekend. Clubs that are held at school and then kids can go straight to after school club or grandparents pick them up.

Lots of good suggestions - you could also share with another parent, if you can bring their child to something at the weekend could they bring yours to a club in the week? Also even with more flexible worming patterns kids can’t do everything - transport options, multiple kids and schedules clash etc so try not to imagine some kid out there doing absolutely everything (although there probably is one!) as most families are having prioritise and let some stuff go.

Definitely once kids are school age, flexibility at work becomes even more important I suppose, because of clubs / play dates / school events. A part-time nanny, people use local university students near me, can massively help and it could just be 2/3 hours 3 times a week say which might be doable. It doesn’t need to be a full time experienced nanny.

We both work FT but neither of us are 9-5 so we juggle things between us. DH early start/early finish, me slightly later start/waaaay later finish but usually only 4 days.
I was lucky enough to be PT for the early years so I have built up a really lovely support network of other mums and don't hesitate to ask for help if we're a bit stuck- we always say yes to helping out if we can so it balances out.
My kids do aaaallll the clubs which feels like a whirlwind but they love it.

One of us will start early and work say an 8am -4pm and that we can juggle the after school activities. Also take a shorter lunch break and finish early. I work from home some days which helps too as I can just pop out to do a quick drop off. I also not all jobs are this flexible.

Also as they get older the activities tend to start a bit later 6/7pm so you have time for a very quick tea and out to the activity.

Most people here tend to do swimming lessons at weekend.

The DC can have a couple of after school activities each but not lots and that's manageable for us. Sport and exercise is really important and if they want to progress or become part of a team they need to start young as it's hard to break into that later once teams are established.

Yeah it's really tough. We used fkexi time or Wfh but even then they won't get to anything before 6... even wfh I'm at my desk till 530! Some local teams do a car pool system which us good or informally pool with neighbours. Honestly I see people on here complain about chatting at school gates but my network of parents are invaluable, you do have to pay it back though!

Mine do a couple that are organised by the school for an hour or so at the end of the day but the other things are after 6 or on Saturdays. Feels like a mad rush every evening.

Kids didn't use to do so many clubs ! Mine did choir (6pm start) and swimming (4.30pm) once a week which one of us would take them to. Mostly I finished work by 3 anyway, dd1 has sn and got kicked out of asc!

We negotiated flexible working as our offices were open quite long hours so we have taken a shift approach. One works 7am-3pm, the other works 9am-5pm. We spread the shifts between us. It is relentless though, especially for the 7am person.

My son goes to ASC and he does football training on a weekday evening, but thankfully it gives me time to get home and for him to get changed before it starts

2 working parents here. We squeeze activities into the weekend and holidays. It's v hard tbh.

This is why many parents chose private because all the extra curricular activities are included in the school day. 2 parents both working FT is very hard to fit in a range of activities and you can spend the weekend just shlepping from 1 activity to another

I really don’t think kids need to do all these structured activities. Sounds exhausting for the whole family! I much prefer just playing at home, taking them to the park/woods/playground or playing with cousins etc. There’s lots of research to show that unstructured play is vital for kids development and opportunities for it are depleting.

Ironically... DD1 is now at Secondary school and has a massive range of options for clubs every night at school. It would have been brilliant when she was younger! This term she's doing film making, drama and dance. She couldn't fit in science, art, cooking, photography or choir that she also fancied. There's always 5 different sports available.

They just have to do less. There’s no need for kids to be doing different activities every night, that’s all more for the parents.