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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think the return on investment is that they are happy and hard working adults.  A lot of the purpose behind those activities is keeping the kid busy to keep them from getting into trouble.  Idle hands are the devil’s playground.  The hard thing about parenting is that it isn’t a linear graph to show what the thing was that kept them from avoiding a bad situation or taught them a life lesson.  So bottom line I think is that you did the best you could with what you had and your kids turned out great.  Not every painter is going to be Picasso, but not being Picasso doesn’t mean one shouldn’t paint.[/quote]

This. you raised well rounded kids[/quote]

Some of these activities have payoffs as well which are not immediately obvious.  I played the piano at a fairly high level (competitions, etc.) and though I am not a musician, I learned:
1.  Tricks for memorizing things -- that came in handy in science classes, history classes and language classes.  I do think the memory is a muscle and all those years of performing concertos and memorizing     them helped me later in this way.
2.  How to just sit down and stick to doing something really boring:  I was always the best student in my language classes in the foreign service and when others asked me what my secret was, I would literally tell them that I have an extremely high tolerance for boredom and repetition.  Suzuki (the Suzuki violin guy) talks about achieving mastery by doing something ten thousand times.  It's good to teach little kids early on that some things aren't fun but they're necessary.  Eventually they will figure out how to make boring things fun and tricks like breaking a thousand repetitions into groups of a hundred, etc.  
3.  How to interact with and have conversations with adults:  By the time I was in high school I was playing music with college students and grad students and I was able to make an argument for why we should interpret something in a particular way, and I also understood a fair amount about how different people can interpret things differently all based on looking at the same page of music.  (This actually came in handy in things like history classes.  I could compare and contrast interpretations and understand how they emerged and also was pretty good at arguing for my viewpoint.)  I truly feel like my last years as a serious musician were kind of like being in grad school for music, and when I actually went to grad school in something else entirely it felt oddly familiar.[/quote]

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