• Children are often involved in many different extracurricular activities growing up.
• Children’s activities can cause unhappiness when they feel pressured to achieve specific values.
• It is important for parents to notice when a child loses interest in an activity and allow for downtime.

Whether taking a child to drama practice, karate class, or both, after school activities it can be time-consuming for both children and parents.

While after school activities can be a great place to make friends and discover new interests, it’s important that these structured activities don’t completely take over a child’s schedule.

Erica Fener Sitkoff, a clinical child psychologist, and Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, spoke to Business Insider about the importance of downtime for kids — even those who seem to thrive on a full schedule of extracurricular activities.

Check with your child about his feelings about his activities

It can be hard to tell if your child’s activities, or even a particular activity, have become overwhelming and if they need more downtime. But be careful, check in and taking some of the stress away is a good place to start.

While your child may naturally excel at structured activities, parents need to remove the pressure around achieving a certain level of success in their activities.

“There’s a difference between giving kids a lot of exposure to things so they figure out what they gravitate toward and what they’re good at,” Fener Stikoff said. “It’s another thing to have them do a lot of things and be the best at all of those things,” adding that this pressure can take the joy out of activities for some kids.

It is also important to check with your child how they feel about the structured activities they are already involved in. One way to do this is to observe more changes in their attitude to their activities.

“What I recommend to parents is if your child doesn’t ask for it or remember that today is the day for such and such activity, then don’t take your child to it,” Gray said. “If your child wants to, then that’s fine. There’s no value in putting your child into an activity they don’t want.”

Fener Sitkoff agreed that it’s important to write down the child’s interest in activities but recommended that you check with them directly.

“Keep checking in with your child to say: Do you still like it? What do you like about it? Is there anything you don’t like about it?” Fener Sitkoff said.

Downtime is key to a child’s overall well-being

Break time and school activities are not mutually exclusive. It is imperative that a child who participates in any activity, even one they love, still finds time to prioritize downtime for the whole. health and development.

Fener Sitkoff told Business Insider that downtime encourages creative thinking, solving problemsreflection and independence.

“If you think about when children are alone, to create their own experiences, they learn confidence” said Fener Sitkoff. “It’s like they’re driving themselves. They learn independence and decision making. Then when they’re with peers, having unstructured downtime, they’re working on their social skills about how to work collaboratively with others.”

Although we can think of downtime as something we should fit in a the child’s program amidst their other activities, it plays a key role that should be recognized as more than an afterthought.

“It’s funny that we even call it downtime,” Gray told Business Insider. “Children are designed to do children’s things play, exploreand pursue their interests. They are not designed to participate in all these adult-directed activities. It’s true that we now call it downtime as if they’re giving up everything else they’re doing, but it should be because that’s childish. It should be what they do in the first place.”

Let your child set the tone for what their downtime looks like

We all have different ideas of what downtime looks like in practice. For some children, recess time can mean catching up with a book single; for others, it may mean playing a new video game they’ve been dying to try.

Fener Sitkoff recommended the center to parents the idea of ​​balance when their involvement in their children’s free time is taken into account.

“When parents schedule and dictate downtime, don’t create that feeling of agency and autonomy to a young man. On the other hand, if you don’t give any structure, then you’re letting a young man who hasn’t had all the life experiences you’ve had to guide himself,” said Fener Sitkoff.

For example, if your child wants to spend his free time using technologyyou can allow them to do that, but help them create guidelines for how long they will use the Stikoff recommended. This might seem like allowing your child to spend 30 minutes playing a digital game rather than more than four hours.

Even if you provide guidelines for how much time your child will spend engaging in certain forms of free time, Gray recommends that parents allow their children to have free time alone or with other children, but not always in the presence of adults.

“Children must run away from adults. It’s not even playing if there’s an adult telling you what to do,” Gray said.

Structured after-school activities can certainly benefit children’s lives, but prioritizing their ability to have uninterrupted time, however your child chooses, is a key aspect of their development.