Balancing extracurricular activities

As the school season starts, many children are embarking on journeys of learning, whether they be in classes and extracurricular activities or in private lessons.

A balanced mix of such pursuits can keep children from being idle after school, especially in America, where students are dismissed from schools around 3 in the afternoon.

I realize that so much extra time and freedom can be a curse in disguise to young children. Paranoid parents schedule too many extracurricular activities, disregarding the actual physical, mental, and psychological loads that their children can bear.

In China, parents often argue that they have to do this in response to competition in the "macro environment" ("da huan jing"). I have also observed that Chinese parents in America are equally notorious for signing their children up for too many activities, even though they can no longer make claims about competition in the "macro environment" there. I think such paranoid behavior has more to do with bad parental choices and a cultural myopia that allows a person to focus only on success.

Children with overcrowded schedules spread their energy out too thinly to be able to concentrate on doing what they could eventually excel in. The best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has discussed a "ten thousand hours" rule, saying that successful people, from Mozart to Bill Gates, spent at least ten thousand hours honing the abilities that eventually led them to success.

Misplaced priorities will only lead to mediocrity or total failure. Moreover, children will never experience joy from performing a half dozen tasks at which they can be nothing but amateurs.

Many parents have taken to sending their children to music or sports classes in protest of "test-driven" education, which has garnered some bad press in China. Parents think that private lessons in music, sports, dance or art are sufficient to provide a well-rounded education.

Yet the developmental psychologist Howard Gardener holds that such an education requires other acquisitions, such as kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences.

Some of these cannot be developed through private lessons or structured extracurricular activities. Unstructured time alone, play dates, walks in the park, at the zoo or at a botanic garden may be equally, if not more, effective in cultivating abilities that children will need to prosper in the future. For instance, naturalistic intelligence is best developed among children who have time to go out and observe plants and animals in nature. And intrapersonal skill can be best acquired if children have time to themselves.

I also believe that children benefit from doing housework. Most Chinese parents I know never allow their children to do chores around the house. They give me the impression that they think children should have no pursuits beyond study and the attainment of success. Household chores are perceived to be of low value, something to be delegated to the housemaids that most middle class families can now hire, or that they should be reserved for their children's future spouses. To them, I would say that these children's parents may have similar plans, and that there's nothing you can do about that. Only if you have your children perform chores at home, can you expect them to develop self-discipline, good work habits and a joy in being productive.

Parents too often function as alarm clocks, completely overseeing their children's schedules and plans. They push their children every step of the way, instead of allowing them to develop the ability to propel themselves forward. Children whose days are neatly structured, will be in for a huge surprise when they enter the workforce.

It is easy to know how much extracurricular activity is too much. Parents can watch for signs of stress that might result from overscheduling. Overscheduled children often lack sleep, show fatigue and become fussy. They may not always be able to express their need for a balanced life. And, since children are all different, detecting such a need is sometimes difficult. It is therefore all the more important for parents to be vigilant. Children tend to trust parents to arrange things for them.

Parents, therefore, should make themselves more deserving of such trust by taking care to make wise choices, at least most of the time.

It is easy to pay for someone to give a child a lesson. It is more difficult, and probably nobler, to become involved in ascertaining the strengths and interests of children, as well as planning and designing a more balanced schedule that allows children to study, work, play and generally be themselves.

The author is a US-based instructional designer, literary translator and columnist writing on cross-cultural issues.