Children activities: Busy Melbourne parents can strike a balance

ARE your Saturday mornings spent taking the kids to a growing myriad of extra-curricular activities to stop them sitting in front of the TV? There’s a way to strike a balance.

Are kids over-subscribed?

FOR Melbourne writer Claire Halliday, Saturday mornings throughout most of 2015 would start when she bundled the youngest three of her four school-age children into the car for the start of a day of extra-curricular activities that wouldn’t end until dinnertime.

First stop was three different tap classes in East St Kilda. Then she would drive one of her daughters to gymnastics, before heading to Camberwell for her son’s acting class. While he was there, she would drive back to St Kilda to deposit her youngest daughter at ballet class, before racing back to Camberwell to pick up her son, and then dashing back to St Kilda to pick up her dancing daughter, as well as her other daughter from the nearby gym.

“I would be out of the house from 9 o’clock to about 5.30,” Halliday says. “And most of that time was spent in the car driving the kids to all their activities. My 16-year-old had Saturday activities, too — a morning ice-skating class and a double acting class in the afternoon — but luckily she’s old enough to get herself there on public transport.”

And that was just Saturday. On the other days, there were swimming lessons and gymnastics, and in winter there was football.

“It got to a stage where it was out of control,” she says. “My seven-year-old had swimming lessons, acting class, tap dancing, ballet class and then Auskick on Sundays. By the time the year ended, we were all exhausted.”

Halliday and her family are not alone.

Claire Halliday’s and her children Edie, 9 [basketball], Abbie, 7, [ballet], Sean, 13 [baseball], and Audrey, 17 [ice skating]. Picture: Alex Coppel.

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Michael Grose, parenting educator and director of Parenting Ideas, has seen a steep rise in the number of families dealing with oversubscribed children: kids who spend their out-of-school hours involved in music lessons, sports practice, dance, language classes … You name it, he says, there’s a kids’ class for it.

“There has definitely been an increase in the number of activities available to kids,” Grose says.

“If you look back 40 years ago, there were very few sports that were open to kids under 10 years old.

“There has been a real shift, and now there’s not a sport that has not been modified to suit smaller children. And it’s not just sport, it’s ballet and performance arts and music.”

Halliday agrees that kids have a seemingly endless offer of extra-curricular activities and lessons and says her approach was about letting her children explore, in the hope they might find their passion.

“I never pushed my kids into anything; they always came to me and said they wanted to do something. When I was younger, there were things I had always wanted to do — learn the piano, have horseriding lessons — but my family wasn’t in a position to make that possible. I guess I didn’t want my own kids to look back and think, ‘I wish I’d been able to learn that.’ ”

But it soon became apparent to Halliday that lessons aren’t just lessons any more. Often they are “programs” — and well-meaning mothers who just wanted to give their kids an interesting experience find themselves locked into commitments that
aren’t planned.

“A couple of years ago, my third child decided she had an interest in gymnastics,” she says. “So I decided to be the good parent and enrolled her in classes. Then she graduated up a class. Then she entered her first competition and won a medal. I felt good, she felt good. But then it becomes this trap — the better she became and the more competitions she did well in, the higher she graduated, and suddenly that weekly lesson on Saturday afternoons became a 10-hour-a-week proposition, training and classes.”

For Bree Attwood, Spotswood mother to two boys, aged five and two, the decision to limit extra-curricular activities has been a conscious one, based partly on necessity and partly on personal values. Her older son, now at school, is encouraged to participate in one weekend sport activity at a time and has guitar lessons during school hours.

“It’s just not possible for us to commit to any activities after school,” she says. “My husband and I both work and we are never sure when we’ll get home. So that leaves the weekend and, frankly, that’s when we do things as a family.

“On weekends we go bike riding or take the dog to the beach, have a hit of tennis, or just kick a ball around the oval. It’s great because it makes me more active, too. I would otherwise be lying on the couch reading.”

But mostly, says Attwood, she wants her kids to have the relaxed, family life of her own childhood.

“I grew up in a small country town and there were five of us kids. After school we all played together. Now I love seeing my two boys playing together, making their own games up, just having a relationship.

“I don’t feel like my kids are missing out on anything at all. They are having a great childhood. We’re not competitive people.”

According to Grose, most parents who oversubscribe their kids have the best intentions.

“Parenting is a very competitive place,” Grose says. “There can be an element of ‘My kid is doing this and this — what’s your kid doing?’ but I think for the most part, parents mean well. I think there is certainly a lot of pressure on parents to give their kids a head start, the best start to life, to prepare them for getting into a good school, and so on.”

Though parents who have their kids in multiple activities and lessons are often seen as pushy, ambitious over-achievers who inflict stress and anguish on their kids, Grose believes extra-curricular activities are important to childhood development.

“Childhood is an explorative stage, so trying new things is good,” he says. “Participating in out-of-school activities has a whole range of benefits.

“If your child isn’t particularly academic, doing activities out of school can boost their self-esteem and help them find their ‘thing’. And during the teenage years, this can contribute to how they define themselves — ‘I’m a surfer’ for example.”

As a single parent, Elwood mum Lyndal Williams says her children’s activities and lessons help her connect with other parents in her neighbourhood
and form vital support networks.

“A lot of weekend activities for kids are actually family activities,” Williams says. “With Little Athletics and Nippers, the whole family participates. I get to catch up with the other parents every week. When we moved here from the United States, I felt like I was starting again. I think these activities helped build a social network and connect us with the community.

“It’s also very important bonding time with your children. Especially once families get to that stage where everyone is busy with work and school during the week, the weekend activities can be time that parents spend alongside their kids, volunteering, coaching or just cheering from the sidelines.

“As the kids get older, the team aspect also becomes important for learning teamwork, sharing and communication, commitment and leadership skills.

“I know a lot of parents are willing to taxi their kids all over the place to games and training, because they can see the benefit of this for their children.”

Grose agrees. “There are three, what we call ‘protective factors’ that kids need, and they are: families, school and community.

“Kids form friendships at activities and become part of a community outside just the school community.”

Extra lessons and activities sometimes become a problem, says Grose, when parents stack on too many activities at once.

Halliday knows too well how the best intentions can quickly get out of hand.

“With my first daughter I was committed to doing as many different activities as possible before she started school. Like a lot of new mums, I was suckered into the idea that to be a good mum I had to make sure I was stimulating her senses in different ways, helping her development. She did love it and so did I because it was quality bonding time with her.

“But the reality of having more than one child is that what you do for one, you have to do for the others, and by the time we got to four kids, the youngest one was spending most of her time in the baby seat in the car going on all these epic journeys driving the other kids to their activities.”

Halliday soon discovered it wasn’t just her energy levels being depleted.

“Lessons cost money, but it was the hidden costs that really hit us. Take Saturday mornings, — I had three kids taking tap dancing lessons. The first one started at 9.30am and the next one started at 10. There was no time in between to go home, so all the kids came with me. In warm weather, it was fine to go to the playground but when the cold weather set in, I would take the other two kids to the cafe nearby and I’d get coffee, maybe they’d have a juice, while we waited. Then we’d swap. That was another $20 a week on top of the cost of lessons. It was a huge financial drain.”

For Grose, the greatest problem with over-scheduling is not so much what the kids are doing — it’s what they’re not doing to make way for the activities.

“One of the most important things you can do for your kids is to have dinner together,” he says. “There are many benefits that come from the simple act of sitting down to a meal together as
a family. And that’s just harder to get with all these activities.

“Another problem I see with kids with full schedules is that they don’t have a lot of time to play by themselves.”

Unregulated play is crucial, he says, for developing creativity and self-expression.

“It’s also important to remember that for every child at an activity, there is a parent dropping them off and picking them up.”

Grose says this can lead to stress and anxiety, which kids can pick up on.

“As a society, we see exhaustion as a status symbol. We have this notion that we should keep running until we stop. That is not good for mental health.

“We need to just not get too busy, and remember to take breaks regularly.

So what is the ideal number of activities for a child?

Grose says there is no magic number, rather steps to ensure you and your family stay on top of things.

“Start looking for the signs that your child may be becoming overwhelmed,” he says. “Are they having trouble keeping up at school? Are they having problems coping? For good mental health, kids need time to relax, and if they are missing out on that, that’s when anxiety sets in.

“So, once a week or even once a fortnight, have a do nothing day — stay in your pyjamas, watch TV, make pancakes — do nothing.”

In her new book, Things My Mother Taught Me, Halliday interviews 20 well-known Australians about the influence of their mum on their lives and the topic of extra-curricular activities was a strong memory for many.

She says politician Fiona Patten remembers her mum’s passion for extra-curricular activities as a positive. As the daughter of a naval officer, the activities were a way to find new friends and help Patten’s working mother have her own life.

“Every place we went, there was sport and Brownies and Girl Guides and those sorts of things. I think it was good for her, too, as it enabled her to meet people and get to know the neighbourhood,” Patten told Halliday. “We used to have swimming or soccer training after school every day and swimming training before school, so I don’t think we noticed her working later and not being at home waiting for us.”

Fashion designer Paul Vasileff, from Paolo Sebastian, told Halliday having parents who organised after-school activities that nurtured his creative talents was critical to his success in the fashion industry.

“From a young age, I think both Mum and Dad could see that I had a passion for the arts. I always loved drawing and creating and they did what they could to help me take it one step further,” Vasileff said. “Mum would organise sewing lessons or art lessons — anything that she could to help support me.”

But with Halliday’s family juggling close to 20 extra-curricular activities, she and her husband decided something had to give. Surprisingly, she says, it wasn’t the drama they had anticipated.

“They got to keep what they are passionate about. My son still does tap dancing and plays baseball and one of my daughters kept ballet. My eldest daughter has kept up her acting — because she is interested in studying drama at uni — but she’s in year 12 this year, so she stopped going to her weekly ice-skating class.”

Daughter Edie, 9, now only does basketball and is learning an instrument at school.

“We didn’t want to tell the kids they had to stop doing lessons they loved,” Halliday says. “So we sat down as a family and talked about what was going on and how we were all feeling, and they actually agreed.”