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We have really made it a point to have our kid play freely as much as possible and minimize scheduled activities (piano lessons etc.) the problem is that most o

• fnimick 3y ago
  Sure, but are you maximizing his college admissions chances via skills in carefully selected activities in order to stand out? (mostly joking, but this is how a lot of people approach scheduling these days)
  • gloryjulio 3y ago
    I agree. You get to be really careful where you want to put ur skill points. Play time is part of the skill tree too ;) Full scheduling of random stuff doesn't mean it would always help the children. It's the children's version of appearing busy.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      A full schedule is bad for a kid. They need to learn how to keep themselves entertained, or plan their own activities, or manage their own time, and they can't do that if they get a day plan from sun up to sun down.
      • shard 3y ago
        Kids can keep themselves entertained very easily nowadays, YouTube/Tiktok/games can suck hours away in the blink of an eye. It's not like when I was young where going outside and hanging out with friends was the most fun choice.
        • atonse 3y ago
          As a tech person I long for the days of limited choices. In this age of extreme abundance, we have lost the ability to just daydream, people watch, etc. I’m not glamorizing being bored. I used to hate waiting for 30 mins for the bus. Sorry this is something I lecture my kids about a lot! :-)
  • atonse 3y ago
    haha I have been maximizing the annoyance level of my parents and others by telling my kids these things: - don’t focus on GPA, focus on actually gaining knowledge and understanding how the world works. good grades are a measure of how you understand things. they should never be the goal. I was a C student and I am more curious about things than many of my peers with fancy degrees. - forge your own path, there is always a thousand different paths out there. College is just one. - no replacement for hard work. don’t expect anything in life. anything worth getting, you’ll have to compete with many others to get it so learn to be a good competitor. - college should be approached with all the tradeoffs and as any other investment. We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck. We’re the only parents in our whole social circle that aren’t saving for their college. it feels weird and isolating when that topic comes up. - first think about the kind of life you want and then make choices to get you that life. they’re already sick if my lectures. and they’re 10 and 5. :-)
    • jzawodn 3y ago
      I wish I could upvote more than once.
    • m-ee 3y ago
      Assuming you’re American you are really screwing then over by not paying for college. The FAFSA assumes a parental contribution. It’s not just other parents, but the federal government and all the colleges themselves that have the expectation that you will contribute. There’s no exemption for “I want to teach my kids financial responsibility”. If you’re high income your children will be ineligible for any financial aid and have few options for funding their own education.
      • AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
        There's always the Post-9/11 GI Bill. 36 months of tuition at the most expensive in-state rate in whatever state you attend school in plus Basic Allowance for Housing equal to an E5 with dependents is quite good.
      • 3y ago
  • kelseyfrog 3y ago
    When does little Johnny learn intrapersonal skills, conflict resolution skills, active listening skills, how to build and maintain friendship skills, or self-determination skills?
• evrimoztamur 3y ago
  This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older. Everybody is busy with their lives and coordinating even with your closest friends leads to 'agenda conflicts' that push your time together weeks or months ahead. It's sad to see that this is happening to kids (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.
  • awesomeMilou 3y ago
    > (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too. Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries. Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss when talking about american childrens typical day in school.
    • grey413 3y ago
      Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.
      • mantas 3y ago
        Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.
        • taeric 3y ago
          Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...) Would love to see updated numbers on it.
• bowsamic 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • lgleason 3y ago
    Yup, I've seen the effects of this first hand.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      I am one of the unmanaged kids and I am very much competing with all the managed ones. I’m 28 and still feeling the effect quite heavily. My wife was managed and she just has such a stronger work ethic and honestly better mental health than I. It’s a miracle I got to where I am frankly
  • mantas 3y ago
    Disadvantaged in what sense? It’s likely those kids won’t even go for the same grind as „managed“ kids.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      Less ability to compete in the job market with others who were managed in basically all skilled jobs
      • jjk166 3y ago
        When was the last time a job interviewer asked what extracurriculars you did when you were 14? There is an extremely small sliver of society where that one additional extracurricular makes the difference between getting into an excellent school vs a merely great school. For everyone else, the long term value is quite dubious.
        • bowsamic 3y ago
          As much as you might want it to be, your life right now is not a blank human plus qualifications. Who you are as a person is shaped by your life before this point. A person who has invested in those extra curricular skills will simply be more skilled now, from precise ways (the specific skills learnt) to more general ways (the required concentration and perseverance etc)
• ccleve 3y ago
  I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only way we can get him out is to call other parents and schedule something. There is something deeply wrong here. I blame other parents who overschedule their kids.
  • afavour 3y ago
    > I blame other parents Ah, the mantra of our parental lives! These classes kids go to aren’t always some kind of arduous, academic overachiever factory. My kid goes to a Spanish immersion after school program once a week and she loves it. She’s made a ton of friends there. We’re not shoving her through the door. Don’t get me wrong, some parents do go over the top with it, no doubt. But a lot of these activities are genuinely enriching.
    • omnicognate 3y ago
      It's not about your kid going to a Spanish class once a week, and the objection isn't that doing that isn't enriching for your kid. The problem is over the holidays when all your kid's friends have been sent to camps and summer schools (mostly as a form of holiday childcare for working parents presumably) or taken away on holiday, leaving your kid with nobody to play with. It presumably varies a lot but it's a real thing in our and our childrens' lives. The summer holidays should be filled with friends and play, not spent at home with your parents because nobody's available.
      • watwut 3y ago
        I still prefer my kid I'm camp or summer school over the kid on Netflix or Steam or whatsapp whole day. Or over me forcing them away from the above after which they still don't go play outside with friends, because friends watch anime or play video game.
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• azemetre 3y ago
  Might be an issue with your social class? I know plenty of poorer parents whose children aren't filled with a myriad of activities because the family simply can afford to pay them, the kids simply act like kids.
• afavour 3y ago
  I’d hesitate to make any broad point with stuff like this. My daughter sounds like your son, she loves unstructured play. My son on the other hand is much happier with structured activities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either.
• giantg2 3y ago
  Same thing as adults. Everyone is too busy to get together, especially after having kids.
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  Structured lessons and organized sports are not the problem, kids have been taking piano lessons and swim lessons and playing Little League baseball since forever. But it can't be exclusively that. They need unstructured free play as well.
• alex_lav 3y ago
  My sister and I have separate mothers. My mother, who I lived with, was pretty absent throughout my childhood. I never really had any monitoring on how I spent my time, for better or worse, but that reality allowed me to kind of chase interests (or ignore interests) and cultivate a lot of passion and curiosity. My sister's mother was the exact opposite. She prioritized "getting to be a mom" over my sister's time and enjoyment, so she became a Scout Leader, Soccer Coach, Ballet Coordinator, Cheer Coach etc. and had my sister join all of those activities. Every day was school from 7-whenever, straight to dance, straight to homework, straight to bed. I don't think my sister ever had more than an hour or two free for her entire childhood. The outcome is kind of wild. She's an anxiety mess, overly controlling, but also unable to really think for herself or prioritize her interests (maybe because she doesn't have a ton?), and usually just takes the path of least resistance or that she's been told to take. I feel sad for her, but I obviously was powerless to stop it.
• kulahan 3y ago
  That sucks. I used to ride the bus home after school, throw my backpack at my house, and run off to play with my buds until the sun started to go down. It was the most amazing part of my day, just being free to be a kid and DO WHATEVER. Sometimes we'd walk to the stream and pick up rocks to look for bugs and crawfish. Sometimes we'd play card games. Sometimes we'd go to the park and play "wall ball", which obviously included a painful peg to the back with a tennis ball if you failed whatever the goal of that game even was! Anyways, point is, this fostered my interest in nature (looking for bugs), my sociability and strategy (card games), and my agility and teamwork (wall ball). This was stuff I worked hard at too, because they were my interests.