By MIA FREEDMAN
Angst #1: I don’t want to teach my kids to be quitters.
Angst #2: I don’t want to be a tiger mum who forces my kids to do stuff they hate.
There are so many moments in parenting like this. Rock and a hard place. Confusion. Paralysis. And I’m smack bang in the middle of one of them right now with my two youngest kids as we stand together on the precipice of a decision I don’t know how to make.
So you’re going to help me.
First, some background.
I’ve never been a big one for after-school activities. Kids need time to just chill out, I believe. Muck around. Amuse themselves. Also, I am lazy and I can’t be bothered being a taxi every afternoon after school. Let alone before school. Wash your mouth out.
Still, they creep into your life, activities do. Currently, my daughter does tennis, soccer, cello, choir and drama. My son does violin. And they both do karate. I don’t even know how some of these things happened. Instruments are compulsory at the school they go to and most of their various lessons are during school time or lunch time.
I have guilt that neither of them currently do swimming but they can both swim and while I know they should be improving their skills, I just…..can’t deal during winter. We’ll possibly get back to it during summer.
Where was I?
So they do all these activities and in fact there isn’t too much taxi-ing involved at all. Karate is really the only one I have to take them to.
I like them doing karate. I like that it takes some of the princess edges off my daughter and gives a bit of a testosterone outlet for my son (which is why I first started him doing it about 18 months ago). My daughter started a few months after my son, invited by the instructor to join in one day while she and I were watching her little brother.
Now though, my daughter wants to quit so she can do drama on a Monday afternoon instead and without her, my son thinks he might like to quit as well. “I’m tired of it” he says although when he’s doing the class and afterwards, he certainly seems to love it.
So. This is my dilemma. Do I let them both quit? Just……quit? My daughter has already quit piano three terms after begging me to let her start lessons at school. “I just have too much on,” she complained. I made her keep going for one more term before putting her lessons “on hold” in much the same way I put my communications degree “on hold” when I started working in the media, fully aware I’d never ever be coming back to finish it.
I’m already concerned that Kids These Days have no tolerance for boredom, no concept of commitment and no understanding that getting good at something – really good – takes time. On the other hand: TIGER MOTHER.
My kids are 6 and 8. Isn’t being a kid about trying different things to see what you like?
Help me people. What do I do?
Top Comments
When I see my kids suffering after persevering with something for a while I try and invent something better / cooler for them to do instead. Stuggling with swimming? try some flippers and a snokel. AFL? try basketball. Violin? try that Ipad piano thing! so we dont quit we "pivot" if that makes sense
I've got to say, as a music teacher, there aren't enough parents picking fewer activities and getting kids to stick to them. I've taught soooo many kids who are too overworked to spend any time in a daily routine committing to practising. I always feel that surely their French teacher, their tennis teacher and their drama teacher must all feel the same way as I do when kids complain about being too busy. And I'm constantly busy, so I do sympathise. I remember just chilling out after school and playing in the backyard, having a few hours off thinking before going back to do homework.
It's hard to enjoy something if you don't feel you are making progress, and there are very few things you can make progress with unless you are doing them regularly. My parents made me pursue one sport, one music lesson and one 'academic' afterschool activity until I was in mid high school. I fought so hard to do more sport and more music, but now I recognise it made me assess just what I wanted to spend my time doing. (They really just didn't want to become taxis - there was no developmental reason behind it!)