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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]School+aftercare or school+activities is plenty. Your oldest is way over scheduled and “working” more hours than you do. [/quote]

OP here. I thought this -- she also does religious/cultural school on weekends too. But I have asked her several times about dropping or choosing favorite activities and she gets annoyed and says she likes it all.

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Kids like activities typically. But more and more research has been showing that TOO much structured activity is not great for kids. Team things are great for some skills, but kids actually learn executive function skills from unstructured play especially without much adult involvement. Many kids in high school and college are struggling with anxiety, depression, etc much more than before and one theory is that the increase in structured activities is partly to blame. Too busy, too much focus on succeeding and being better, and not enough time to learn those really important skills to manage disappointment, frustration etc. People who work in these areas are seeing this over and over. Good books on it are Raising a Kid who Can and the self driven child.

I get that no one wants to hear this because it is the generally agreed upon approach especially on dcum to do as much as possible and everyone says well my kid likes it. But in my opinion, if you want more family time it can’t be your only assessment of whether you should do it. Balancing the whole family’s schedule, stress level, down time as a family, time with siblings, unstructured time with friends is not something a kid is going to think about when assessing whether they want to do something. [/quote]

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