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Hi, I am Nataly and I am the co-founder of Work It, Mom!
I write the daily Work It, Mom! Blog where I talk about issues affecting working moms, goings on in our Work It, Mom! community, new site features, updates,and contests. I also share my own juggle between work and family and love to see members jump in with comments. Come and visit often!
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My daughter is four years old. Well, four and a little bit, as she prefers me to say. As of right now, she goes to gymnastics (Friday afternoon after school, which is the one afternoon a week that I take off from work to be with her), music (Saturday morning), and ballet (Sunday morning). I’d love for her to take karate (I think it’s great for strength and positive body image for girls, in particular), go to few hours of Russian weekend school (I grew up there and it’s important to me that she speak the language and know how to read and write) and oh, play a team sport (probably soccer, since they offer it at the elementary school where she will go next year).
I think it’s great to expose kids to all sorts of activities early on. At the same time, I think what I wrote above is slightly insane and leaves our daughter no down time and us no family time on weekends since as working parents, we can’t take her to most of the activities during the week.
This weekend I had the “how do we balance out exposing our kids to many interesting activities while not over-scheduling them and driving ourselves nuts” conversation with two other moms. None of us came up with a solution but it was good to know that I am not the only one trying to figure this out. I always pledged that I would not have one of those kids who has no free time to… well, just be a kid and I am a little freaked out when I see how quickly we get sucked into that over-scheduled life. I know that as my daughter gets older she will probably pick some activities over others, but at the moment, I am worried whether we’re overloading her.
How do you balance involving your kids in activities they enjoy and not over-scheduling them and taking away family time? Do your kids have weekend activities or is this something you stay away from?
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I am a mother of 4 children ranging from 11 months to 11 years old.
We normally take Saturday to do activities with the kids, such as football and dance and use Sunday as our family day.
I wanted until my children were old enough to ask me to participate. My son was 9 when he asked if he could get involved with Martial Arts. He began Tang Soo Doo the next week. When he was 10 football was the new much do activity, and he plays football as well.
My daughter who is now 4, asked a few weeks ago if she could be a cheerleader, which just so happened at the right time, becuase sign ups were the next week. I did enroll her in Cheer and that is her weekly activity and Saturday she has the football games.
She cheers the same time my sons has football so it works out well for us.
Work At Home Mom Tara | September 22nd, 2008 at 2:00 am
I had my daughter in ballet/tap when she was 3/4, but we moved and I didn’t like the local dance school, so we opted out of activities for a while. She did Girl Scouts from 5 - 7 (3 years as the leader was enough for me, the other mom’s didn’t help much). Now she’s in an acting program. Worshops on Saturdays. She loves it. I would love to have her in a music class when we can afford it and my husband’s hoping she’ll want to play softball someday so he can coach.
Right now we can’t afford to have her in too many things, but she doesn’t seem to be suffering. I told her she can pick one thing and she picked acting, so that’s where we put out time & money.
Kit | September 22nd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I subscribe to the 1-2 activity per week school of thought. My almost 4 year old takes gymnastics Saturday mornings and my 1 year old goes to a parent-tot class on Friday mornings with her dad. The rest of their free time is spent hanging with neighborhood kids informally or doing things with us. That leaves us time for birthday parties and the occasional playdate.
Marketing Mommy | September 22nd, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Matthew and I have this conversation all the time, because you are right. It is SO easy to over-book. We try to balance it out. The last few winters have been full of swimming lessons, but now that the older 2 can swim we are going to put them in skating. We want to expose them to different activities but not burn them out
Angella | September 22nd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Your kid can do it all — just not all at once. The classes my 3 year old takes at either the YMCA or park rec center tend to run 8-10 weeks. I just switch the activity each time. So it’s 2 months of swimming, then 2 months of music, then 2 months of gymnastics, then 2 months of sports. At any given time he’s only got one class going on, but he gets to experience everything that is on offer.
When he’s older, I plan to let him choose one sport and one arts activity per season — but if it seems too much we may switch to one at a time.
SoftwareMom | September 22nd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I wonder if it helps to think about the different types of activites in terms of the skills and experiences they’re giving… From my experience, ballet and karate teach similar kinds of body control (with different attitudes towards the purpose) while music and language would access more distinct parts of her brain.
On the other hand, there’s also just letting her do what she’s interested in.
Emily | September 24th, 2008 at 3:13 pm