Accumulating extracurricular activities can potentially harm children’s development and well-being. How busy should they be? Explained.
- Children who do too many extracurricular activities are more tired and spend less quality time with their family members.
- In addition, it negatively impacts their non-cognitive skills (emotional regulation, well-being).
- A psychologist advises to do only one extracurricular activity in order to give children free time to play and get bored.
Dance, judo, theater, drawing, piano… As the years go by, the options become more numerous. As with every start of the school year, parents encourage their children to do extracurricular activities to keep them busy on Wednesdays or after school. The reason is simple: these activities allow them to exercise, stimulate their cognitive functions (attention, memory) and creativity, their team spirit, their competitive spirit and their adventure, to open up to others but also to discover new passions.
Since parents hope that these extracurricular activities will benefit their children in the short and long term, some fill all their free time with hobbies. “I notice that some children have hectic schedules, between sports, cultural and artistic activities, not to mention possible appointments with the shrink, speech therapist, etc. Let’s stop piling up activities and overloading their days!” reports, to The DispatchLaurence Roque-Barret, psychologist in Gironde.
Too many extracurricular activities harm children’s mental health
Indeed, having busy schedules can be negative for the well-being of toddlers and adolescents. According to a study, conducted among 48 families and published in the journal Taylor & Francis Sportchildren participating in extracurricular activities four to five days a week were “exhausted”. In addition, extracurricular involvement appeared to dominate family life. As a result, young people spent less quality time with their family members. This “could do more harm than good”, warned Sharon Wheeler, lead author of the work.
Other research, recently published in the journal Economics of Education Reviewalso show that doing too many extracurricular activities has an impact on the mental health of adolescents. “The last hour spent on these activities contributes negatively to the child’s non-cognitive skills (emotional regulation, well-being). (…) If you reduce children’s activities, they might lose a little bit in cognitive skills, but their losses in non-cognitive skills are already so high that this chance might be worth it,” said Carolina Caetano, co-author of the research.
A single extracurricular activity that “must first please the children and not the parents”
So how many extracurricular activities should kids do? Just one that “must please children first and not parents”, according to Laurence Roque-Barret. The psychologist believes that this allows young people to have free time. “Children who have too many activities no longer even have time to play, in the sense of spending time on self-rewarding activities. That is to say, which have no other goal than the pleasure of playing the game. This play time is essential.” She adds that they also don’t have time to get bored, which is essential for developing their imagination.
