Making children do extra curricular activities

[Daisyblossom13]

How do you feel about forcing/pushing school into doing extra curricular activities.

Ds is 9, soon to be 10.

He plays football in a team and does swimming lessons. All fine, that’s plenty.

He enjoys the football, but does sometimes complain about going to matches on weekends. He’s not brilliant but certainly not terrible. The football teams are getting much more competitive and selective as he’s getting older. He has the opportunity to join a second team which is very relaxed/just for fun and not too time consuming, and would give him a bit more practise, but he doesn’t want to. His only reason is that he can’t be bothered.

He moans like crazy about going to swimming lessons, he’s a very good swimmer, so could potentially stop, but it’s only 30 minutes a week and it’s not like he finds it difficult.

We tried tennis but he hated it, we started taking him to parkrun, he’s a really good, fast runner, but he always said he couldn’t be bothered to go.

I don’t want to over schedule him, but I do find it a little bit odd that he can’t be bothered to do anything lot of these things. He doesn’t like going out much at all. He doesn’t like school, no particular reason, he just wants to be at home. He only likes going out for a very short time and short distance and always wants to go home.

As a family, we cycled a lot when the dc were younger and they biyjThroughout primary school we encouraged all sorts of other sports, when the were offered as holiday or after schooland both had music lessons at their request (we have an excellent school music service).

Now, as teens they have settled on their things. For DD drums, percussion (several bands!), cricket (year round) and scouting; for DS music - guitars (classical and electric) and choir, he's several bands/ensembles), archery, weight training and scouting.

DS has been having Sixth Form interviews recently - having hobbies, what he's learnt from them (discipline in training/practising; performing in public; self confidence) , demonstrating his ability to learn and progress, work in a team, lead etc has been very useful in setting him apart from other Y11s with good GCSE predictions!, adding to what makes him interesting to the interviews, giving him some dimensions etc.

I guess what I'm saying is..., primary school years are for trying different things.. don't waste time on what he's not enjoying, but do encourage those he enjoys and trying new things. Something will stick!

I'd never force it. They need time to just relax as well.

My children didn't start any clubs until high school. One does football, one does St John cadets.

Yeah maybe be a bit more inclined to do stuff without the screens. Dgs is almost 8. Not allowed iPad at all in week and an hour a day at weekends. He soon finds himself something else to do even if it's on the trampoline in the middle of bloody winter.

And he has lazy tendencies as well

Like other posters, I told my two boys that they had to do something. DS1 has discovered he’s actually quite sporty despite not being a particularly fast runner and has picked up 3 sports in total. DS2 seems to pick a sport, carry it on for a year or so and then drop it. This has always been fine with me, as long as he has something else he wants to replace it with.

I get their time is their own, but if I left my two to their own devices they’d spend every spare minute festering in front of a screen. I’m their mother, I know that’s bad for them, so off to their sports they go.

You can’t make him do things but you can limit the time he spends on YouTube!

Even if it’s lazing around reading, he’s too young to have unlimited screen time

Fieldcraft
Drill
First Aid
Shooting
Sports such as athletics and football
Lots of weekends away and up to two weeks annual camp in summer. It teaches resilience, self sufficiency, team work and lots of life skills. It’s also low cost for the amount of activities they do. I genuinely didn’t think my DS would enjoy it but he stayed until he aged out at 18. It gave him a much wider social circle too. As they progress through the ranks they’re encouraged to teach the younger ones so gives them good people skills too.

I'd introduce him to baking and cooking. With the aim he cooks and serves tea once a week as well as learns useful skills for the future. Something you can do together to start with too.

Admittedly haven't rtft but fucking hell just realised he is 9??! You do realise that YouTube is age 13, Op and for good reason?! There's some Awful content on there and if your son is watching unsupervised it's definitely not good!

Even when I thought we were talking about a 14-15 year old I was leaning towards no that's not great but 9 absolutely not. Of course he would rather take the lazy option, I expect if you let him entirely self feed he would "survive" on crisps biscuits and similarly crappy options but there's no way you'd be ok with that I'm guessing..!?

Agree with trying to find extra curriculars he likes and limiting screens (assuming he’s just consuming media and not becoming a programming whizz or something). But he may not like any clubs. Lots of people are just homebodies and there isn’t anything wrong with that. If you don’t need him to be in a club for childcare reasons I wouldn’t force him to do things he doesn’t enjoy. As well as helping him look at other ideas for clubs, could you look at helping him develop a passion at home? Lots of kids used to be homebodies before screens came along and developed passions for reading, model building, gardening, lego, etc.

Are there any clubs at his school? If he went straight to one after school, he could come straight home to what he wants to do and not feel like he has to go out again.

When I was at uni I met a lot of boys/men that had come up through cadets and joined the university OTC.

they had a whale of a time. Built in social circle, weekends away, cheap booze, formal dances where they could do the whole invite girls thing…I had a friend who was very into one of them and used to drag us down to the club house for nights out. Always good fun and made a change from dingy nightclubs and the su bar.

I think at least a few went on to sandhurst and got cracking careers out of it. One I googled/stalked recently and he has a big city job and is still training cadets in his spare time.

Why can't you do other things with him outside school?.
Take him to the library ( always something going on.. my 10 year old Grandson joined a coding group). Museums are good too.
We have educational museums like Eureka.. Film and photography museum.. coal mining museum.. do you have anything like that?.
Grandson loves the skatepark on his scooter or skate board.. loads of kids there and loads of older ones always showing / teaching him how to do tricks etc.
He also goes to a game board group.
I'm sure you will find something other than sport.
( we take him swimming.. more enjoyable than swimming lessons.. he could swim under water at age 4.. because it was one to one ).

So, my advice is to KEEP HIM DOING the activities, ideally in a structured environment.
My DS is 14 and we made the mistake of letting him stop. The result is he sits around at home on screens for hours, and just does the same stuff as before, but dragging it out (so he doesn't study any more than he did before, he just drags it out if you see what I mean). And, more playstation.

I think you need to keep him in CLUBS, where hopefully he makes friends, and there is a structure around it. Eg, if he is good at running, put him in an athletics club, where he can train, and see his parkrun times improve. Just parkrun on its own, the onus will be on you to make him turn up, if it's in a club it's different.

The thing is once he stops, he stops improving, whilst others improve. And then no child or teen wants to join anything where they will be a bit rubbish compared to their peers. Which they will be, if those kids have been doing it for a couple of years and they haven't.

So I wouldn't make him do a million things, but pick a couple, so swimming and running, or running and football, and get him in a club on those so he doesn't 'fall off the train'.

He sounds very similar to my son in terms of interests. I let him stop the swimming, and didn't force the running. Result now is he is less fit and fast than he was, won't go to a running club any more as he can see the others are much faster, and when there are new sports done in school like rowing, he doesn't do so well on the ergs as some of the ones who have been swimming regularly etc, so doesn't make a good boat, and so he is not latching on to the rowing either. It's a vicious circle.

Keep pushing it (obviously if one particular activity is awful then stop that, but generally keep him in things).
I used to swim county standard, training 4 times a week, and i can tell you I didn't always want to go and my parents used to make me. But I am SO glad that I did, as I am proud of my achievements and 30 years later my fitness is still decent, all from what I did back then.

I'm not someone that demonises screen time per se...but it depends what he is watching ..a series or film that has characters, plots, themes, maybe imaginative and fantastical settings are one thing. Hours of short clips of brain numbing nonsense that give frequent dopamine hits, reducing the brain's ability to focus and concentrate for lengths of time is something else. There's a balance to be struck somewhere but as a teacher of 11-18 I can testify that even the brightest kids now, who don't read, don't do much other than doomscroll find it ever harder to maintain focus for a 90 minute lesson, let alone a two hour exam.

Fwiw I have similar problems with my 10 and 12 year old and the constant desire to be glued to a device of some sort and resistance to activities (especially organized ones!) but they have with persistence and insistence both found some hobbies they are happy to do, to varying degrees. It's also good to let them choose decent non organised activities like art, craft, reading, cooking?. Of course they will say they don't want to at first but given no other option they'll soon get stuck in, from experience.

They still beg and wheedle for device time but if they've done a decent amount of "extra curricular" I'm more inclined to ok it!

Good luck with it, op, you need to practise your Deaf ears - to the endless "I'm bored" refrain! 😂 - to handle this!

Well you either set some rules now and get him into other sports and activities or it’s a complete lost battle by the time he is a teenager. My DD (same age) does 4 sports a week plus swimming, so I think football and swimming is the bare minimum. Of course he is not interested, he is addicted to youtube already. Read Jonathan Haidt and get some time limits on his ipad.

I did nothing as a kid. Literally nothing after school or at weekends. A mixture of it being the 90s when there was just a lot fewer options, and me liking ny own company and my own house.

i do loads now and have a full life. It’s nothing to worry about if he doesn’t.

But I assume you didn’t watch YouTube all day?

I ENCOURAGED DD to do loads when she was younger - brownies, music, athletics , archery, chess, swimming etc.
She dropped them all (apart from brownies and then guides) and she had to be made to keep going when she did go. She’s ND though, so she does so stuff constantly, but in her room.

I was disappointed as I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s and no one did anything really. Music through school and then maybe orchestra, boys played football, we all did brownies, a girl from school did dancing. I would have loved the chance to do all these things now, it is what it is though,

He doesn’t watch YouTube unsupervised 🙄

He watches YouTube kids with age restricted access, downstairs in the lounge. He plays on a games console too.

Good for you if your children weren’t allowed to watch YouTube before age 13. But nearly every child I know of does.

He’s watching cats play football and watching kids do soccer drills, not playing catching porn with bottle of vodka 🙄

I spent a lot of time playing on my Amiga!

The school do a few things, but the sports are really hard to get a place on and he never gets a place.

He doesn’t want to do choir or learn an instrument.

He wants to do football/dodgebalk/multi sport but can never get a place.

I was forced to do judo as a kid/teen. I hated it and was absolute shit at it. My technique was ok, but after a few belt colours, it is fighting that counts and I am no fighter. I was still dragged to grading events and competitions and told off for not trying hard enough. The best medal I won was bronze, and that was because there were only 3 of us in my weight group.
My parents tried to sell it as some way of learning self defence. But as a young teen girl, I was really not comfortable with teen boys lying on top of me in a hold. I feel sick now when I think about it.

My sister went on to compete at a national level.

Hence why series like "Adolescence" are being made with everyone going, my gosh how awful! 🙄 You didn't say YouTube kids to be fair (& in the same post you're also saying everyone you know's kid is watching YouTube so hmmm) but even then it's mind-melting stuff and you know it or you wouldn't have posted?

And I did say I have the same issues with mine (the YouTube issue solved itself then the remote broke 🥳) 🤷🏼‍♀️

Editing to delete a repeat post 🤦🏼‍♀️