Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP - I would stick with piano if you want your kid to have some skills, trombone if you want your kid to have the social experience of band. Not both. My son took a few years of piano and by the end wasn't practicing much. We took a break for a year and started back with a different teacher. He now practices all the time and is progressing rapidly. I can tell you that as a middle schooler my son is good enough on the piano to have fun with it, and this is great.

The foreign language: unless this is religious training, or literacy training in a language you speak at home, I would drop it. Class without reinforcement is useless.

I say all this as the parent of a middle schooler doing three sports and piano (one sport ratcheting down, one ratcheting up and as long as grades are good I have no valid reason for saying "no"). For us, this works, but my son has complete buy-in. We both let out a huge sigh of relief when the intense years of religious training ended.

I would not cut tennis if he enjoys it, but personally I think one class and adding some practice in its place is plenty. My son played travel soccer by that age, and therefore spent a fair amount of time practicing. It was really good for him and he slept well every night.

I'm 21:03 with the 3rd grader and think this is a good analysis. Pick the instrument he prefers, musical training is excellent. Only one tennis lesson per week but amp up practice because that is when muscle memory and skill building kick in. If you can not offer immersion in the foreign language at home (ie one of you is fluent and speaks it with him), then it's a complete waste of time. I say this as a multi-cultural person who can only speak one of my two "native" languages. My kids will only speak one out of three, because it's the one DH and I speak. Too bad.

Ask your wife why she pushes so much. I suspect it is a social thing - her friends do it, and she probably meets them there and chats, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That amount of activities is perfectly normal for some kids and way too much for others. Your DW may be trying to keep up with what others are doing. If some of the activities are a full year commitment, you may have to wait until the next sign-up period. From a cost and time perspective, activities are only worthwhile if the kid is getting alot out of it.

You think 12hrs a week of extra activities can be perfectly normal for a 10yr old? Do kids ever have time to do their own things or do Mommies have to structure their entire lives?? I feel bad for kids these days with their pushy parents trying to rationalize 4-7 activities and countless hours of things they aren't even that interested in. I look around our ghost town of a neighborhood and am so happy I am not a kid these days. I have a lot more memories of the games we played and created, than any sport or music lesson I took.

Anonymous wrote:To 11:31, you may be nostalgic of free leisure time, but you should keep your judgments to yourself since this is sadly it is not the reality in which our children live. As you mentioned in your post, most neighborhoods are ghost towns, and if I booted out my kids out of the house and told them to entertain themselves, they would find no one else in the neighborhood. So if I don't want may kids sitting around and begging to watch TV, I pretty much have to schedule activities for them. I do force them to entertain themselves for an hour or two a day (reading, playing instruments, doing art, etc.) but it is not really fair to them, (especially when they were younger) to kill 5-6 hours daily.

Anonymous wrote:To 11:31, you may be nostalgic of free leisure time, but you should keep your judgments to yourself since this is sadly it is not the reality in which our children live. As you mentioned in your post, most neighborhoods are ghost towns, and if I booted out my kids out of the house and told them to entertain themselves, they would find no one else in the neighborhood. So if I don't want may kids sitting around and begging to watch TV, I pretty much have to schedule activities for them. I do force them to entertain themselves for an hour or two a day (reading, playing instruments, doing art, etc.) but it is not really fair to them, (especially when they were younger) to kill 5-6 hours daily.

Anonymous wrote:That amount of activities is perfectly normal for some kids and way too much for others. Your DW may be trying to keep up with what others are doing. If some of the activities are a full year commitment, you may have to wait until the next sign-up period. From a cost and time perspective, activities are only worthwhile if the kid is getting alot out of it.

Anonymous wrote:OP - I would stick with piano if you want your kid to have some skills, trombone if you want your kid to have the social experience of band. Not both. My son took a few years of piano and by the end wasn't practicing much. We took a break for a year and started back with a different teacher. He now practices all the time and is progressing rapidly. I can tell you that as a middle schooler my son is good enough on the piano to have fun with it, and this is great.

The foreign language: unless this is religious training, or literacy training in a language you speak at home, I would drop it. Class without reinforcement is useless.

I say all this as the parent of a middle schooler doing three sports and piano (one sport ratcheting down, one ratcheting up and as long as grades are good I have no valid reason for saying "no"). For us, this works, but my son has complete buy-in. We both let out a huge sigh of relief when the intense years of religious training ended.

I would not cut tennis if he enjoys it, but personally I think one class and adding some practice in its place is plenty. My son played travel soccer by that age, and therefore spent a fair amount of time practicing. It was really good for him and he slept well every night.