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 we are about to go into the Summer term why don’t you look for a cricket club and see if he enjoys that?

Why on earth would your force someone? Are you trying to live through him? It's weird

I’d encourage him to join the more relaxed football team then say he can drop the more competitive one.

Re swimming, I insist on lessons but once they’ve reached a very competent swimming stage would drop that if they don’t want to do swimming club etc.

I’d try Scouts or see if the school do chess, board games club or similar. Does he play an instrument?

I don’t think kids need to do loads but equally if they don’t do anything there’s less for them to talk about in university applications and a danger they go in to lazy/pointless hanging around or too much screen time mode as teens.

My DS has had the chance to try all kinds - swimming, ballet, drama, board games, riding, football and cricket. He wanted to drop drama, board games, football and ballet so I let him. He didn’t like the riding lesson so we’ll drop that for a year and try again once more at a different riding school- again, if he doesn’t like it we won’t pursue.

He wants to try piano so I’m trying to find a teacher and his name is down for Beavers. He also wants to try Spanish (no idea where that’s come from but fine by me) so will start Spanish club at school after Easter. Again, I’m just trying to find things in the hope he finds something he can do well at and stick at.

I insist on weekly swimming lessons and in future will say he needs to carry on with piano or Beavers and ideally a sport for at least a couple of years. But I won’t force anything else or really make him if he loathes anything (except swimming).

I think it’s good to try other pursuits and that, sadly, sport, music and languages at state schools are insufficient so need supplementing outside school.

With regards to the swimming, he moans like crazy about going, but he always comes away in a good mood and feeling proud.

I don’t know anything about cricket but it’s worth looking into.

I do think he’d like climbing and that’s not something I’d thought of.

You’re weird and you have bad reading comprehension. HTH.

Futsal is worth looking into if he enjoys football. We have used Pokemon Go and geocaching to get our children out walking as they find it more enjoyable.

His club were offering Futsal but he didn’t want to. It was only blocks of 4 and a free taster session.

This is where I’m wondering if it’s mean to say to him “look, just give it a try”.

Obviously I wouldn’t force him to keep doing something that he detested.

pushing children

It’s a "normal" conversation/topic of discussion. Not inflammatory.

Don't agree with you here, I'm just a random though, to me it's NOT normal

"Some people have got real issues" you really can't see it though @Daisyblossom13 we all parent differently.

Whatever works for you though, as long as your son is happy, that must be the ultimate goal🤗

Not mean to say that at all, they won’t know if they like something or not unless they try.

they absolutely would not be allowed to give everything up and watch brain rot at home every evening.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't you just take the screens away and make sure they've got plenty of other things to occupy and entertain themselves with at home?

So for example. Neither of my children wanted to learn to ride a bicycle. My ds1 actually cried when we got him a new bike age 6 because he loved his old one.

5 minutes outside and he was happily riding on 2 wheels. He spent many happy years after that cycling and still cycles occasionally now.

Ds2 learnt age 5 within minutes even after saying he couldn’t do it.

Some people would say just let them do it when they’re ready. But some children would simply never try things if they’re ready weren’t persuaded.

Im not talking about dragging a small child kicking and screaming to an activity they despise.

Absolutely this.

I push my son to do things because he is naturally reluctant.

I pushed him to give up his beloved balance bike and learn to ride his new pedal bike because I knew he was capable of it. After the initial grumbling he got the hang of the pedal bike and was happily zooming around at the age of 3.5.

This time last year he hated the swimming pool, didn't want to go in at all and refused to let go of me when he did go in. I didn't let him stay in his comfort zone but went in hard with small group swimming lessons and taking him to the pool once or twice a week. Six months later (at just turned 4) he is happily jumping into deep water from the side of the pool, putting his whole head under, and can swim several metres without any kind of float.

He has been resistant to most things, potty training, giving up his dummy, speaking English (we are a bilingual family living in a non English speaking country). I've learned that sometimes you just have to push them through the resistance and out the other side. Once they realise that you're not going to accept them not doing it, they just get on with it.

Screens are a huge problem and rot children's brains though.

Because sometimes you have to push children to give things a go, so they have the opportunity to discover what they enjoy and are good at. Me pushing DD to always do an active hobby led to her discovering volleyball, which has become her passion, so much so that she's sad it'll soon be the summer break from training and is insisting that I train with her during the holidays. I also pushed her to join an extra curricular at school and she discovered D&D that way, and found out she really enjoys it. If she had had her way, she wouldn't be doing any of these things and would have a much narrower life with less friends as a result. And in all likelihood she'd be less fit and healthy because she's at an age where girls are less active unless they're in sports and it all goes downhill from there.

Very well done to your DS for overcoming his fears and pushing on.

And he's so proud of himself now he can do these things!

There’s a middle ground. I disliked violin lessons so got my mum to stop them. Adult me desperately wishes I’d stuck with it.

I very much regret quitting piano as a teenager

I agree, I also regret quitting lots of things. In my teens I had zero sporty interests left and gained weight. I wish I was forced to continue 1-2 things.

I regret not doing things and lots of friends who regret giving up instruments. It’s hard to remember at the time you probably hated it though. you wouldn’t be happy as an activity you didn’t enjoy in your free time.

I had a friend who coached athletics and said 14 was the tricky age as other stuff does seem to very important. But if you force them then their heart isn’t in it anyway. They complain to him about stopping when they are older.

I didn't hate piano, I just couldn't be bothered with practicing and I wasn't keen on my new teacher. If my parents had made me continue, with a different teacher, I am fairly sure I'd have found enjoyment in it again as I still liked playing.
But in fairness to my parents, I didn't tell them that the teacher was the issue, just that I wanted to quit.

"The point is I would like him to carry on. It's only 30 minutes per week and it keeps the skill going. He can perfect his technique/learnto dive correctly/earn badges/do life guarding"

Can he swim? Yes he can. Does he want to carry on and do all those other things? No he doesn't. And because he doesn't want to do them, he will not be making an earnest effort to improve and gain those additional skills, which makes continuing a waste of time and money.

So let him stop. All you are doing now is building resentment.

your son is way ahead of my kids in swimming and we let my daughter stop. She hated it and reached the point where she wouldn’t die immediately if she fell off a pier which was our goal. If he hates it I’d likely let him quit in favour of doing something else of his choice.

for us the limiting factors are time and money so if you’re up for more transport and spending then I’d try loads of things. Football only gets more and more competitive so worth seeing if something else sparks interest. My son does football and taekwando (and swimming but he’s desperate to quit) and my daughter dances several hours a week. They both love bouldering and climbing and my daughter does a kayak club for a week in the school holidays and an art club another week. We are considering a musical theatre camp next summer. There are so many options.

What are you going on about? What are all of these other things that he doesn’t want to do and is being made to?

The only thing he does that he complains about is swimming. It’s absolute rubbish they he won’t be making progress, because he is making a lot of progress.

Each to their own on swimming, but I want my children to be very strong, competent swimmers. There are good reasons for it in my opinion.

I believe they’re referring to you saying “he can perfect his technique/learn to dive correctly/earn badges/do life guarding” when they say “those other things.” To be honest, I would have to agree if it’s you that wants him to carry on and he doesn’t necessarily. You’ve done a good thing by him by making sure he is a strong, competent swimmer, but it sounds as though it’s you that wants him to achieve those things you’ve listed and not necessarily him? I’m not trying to be harsh, but you probably need to introspect on your own motives here.

I see what you mean yes.

My pov is that at 9 you don’t always know what’s best for you and I don’t particularly think that having to swim for 30 minutes per week is a terrible thing to have a child to. Even if they don’t really want to.

Like I said, although he complains about having to go, he’s always very happy afterwards and proud of himself.

There are lots of good reasons for becoming a better swimmer than just ‘being able to swim’.