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[quote=Anonymous]What does overscheduled mean to you. What is a more relaxed schedule.

We've always taken schedule and stress into account with kids activities and made choices that are easier for us and the kids -- activities closer to our house and with lower time commitments. But our kids have always been active.

I have a high school freshman who does ballet and swimming and I don't think she's ever been overscheduled. We weren't aiming for professional dancer or Olympic swimmer with either of them -- she just enjoyed them so we supported that by signing her up for classes and summer swim. For a long time she did ballet once a week and swimming once a week and that really only stepped up in late elementary and even then we kept it lower key by keeping her in a small ballet studio convenient to our house with less of a performance focus (just one recital a year) and she did stroke and turn instead of club swim.

Anyway now she dances "en pointe" and is at a pre-professional program where she does the Nutcracker and a spring showcase every year and she gets good roles. She is considering a dance minor in college. She's swimming on her high school team and is not going to break any records but she can hang in. There will be no athletic scholarships but again that was never our plan anyway.

She's a straight A student and loves school and has friends. She wants to go into science and plans to pursue a PhD. She's a happy and well-adjusted kid and while college admissions are intimidating I can see her being happy at a wide variety of schools so we plan to just keep an open mind and be practical when it comes time for that.

But I don't know -- some people might say she was overscheduled. We never did any travel or club sports and we did very minimal academic enrichment (some at-home math enrichment via AoPs and she did a "writing camp" every summer that I think helped a lot with her writing). It felt manageable to us.[/quote]

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