Is Your Child Over-Scheduled? Here’s How You Can Help Them Manage Their Timetable With Ease
As a parent, you want what’s best for your child. You want your child to excel in every aspect of life, so you keep introducing them to new activities and experiences. Of course, you think you are aiding their overall growth and development while exposing them to new things in life. This has advantages, such as children participating in various extracurricular activities and not receiving a textbook-only education.
However, so many different activities and experiences demand your child’s energy. Also, children have to balance their extracurricular activities with their academics. Unfortunately, children are not an endless fountain of energy, and there’s very little time to do everything. Like adults, children also need downtime. Parents often find it difficult to understand when they are overscheduling their kids to aid their development and make them work hard.
Even though parents try to create schedules for their children to keep them occupied and busy, sometimes it makes children so busy they lose out on their childhood. That’s when schedules go wrong, and parents need to help ease their children’s schedules so they can have a wonderful childhood experience. So, if you are a parent and wondering what you should do, here’s what you need to know about overscheduling your kids.
How To Understand Your Child Is Over-Scheduled?
Enrolling your child in a good school doesn’t end the responsibility of parents. They need to be involved in their child’s life at every step of the way. Whether you are sending your child to any of the CBSE schools in Siliguri, West Bengal, or ICSE schools, you must understand that they are already struggling to cope with academics. Also, most of these schools have extracurricular activities where children can participate to experience holistic growth and development.
However, not every child is the same, and some may struggle more than the rest to keep up. To understand if your child is feeling overburdened with the present schedule, you need to ask the following question:
- Is your kid showing signs of reluctance to partake in extracurricular activities?
- Is your child unwilling to go to school or attend online classes?
- Does your child forget chores or homework?
- Is your child irritable and quick to react when you ask them to do anything extra after their school hours?
- Does your child stay preoccupied or show zero interest in family interactions?
- Has your child expressed disdain toward any activity or chore that you make them do?
- Do you feel drained out trying to keep up with your child’s schedule?
If you say yes to most of these questions, you need to analyze your child’s schedule and make some changes. It is important to keep your child’s schedule relaxed to have some downtime and enjoy a happy childhood. Also, it would help if you let your child choose the extracurricular activities they want to pursue and not force them into activities they don’t enjoy.
Parents must remember that focusing on all the extracurricular activities and academics at once will not help children become masters in any of them. Instead, they need to decide what they like and pursue their talent. For instance, you may want your child to become a swimmer, footballer, and chess expert, along with being a math genius. But that is putting too much pressure on your child. So instead, it would help if you allowed your child to focus on one thing at a time while they can pick up the rest later. The key here is to find the right balance.
Ways To Ease Your Child’s Schedule
For starters, you need to start by doing less. Don’t push your child to do everything at once. Also, you can get your child enrolled in Sri Sri Academy Siliguri where they can select the extracurricular activities they like.
- Unhesitatingly cancel the activities that don’t bring joy or fun to your kid, and they feel too tired participating in those activities
If you’re constantly forcing your child to partake in certain activities, your child isn’t having any fun. It is best to cancel those activities out of the schedule and utilize the time to do something that brings joy to your child.
- Don’t allow routines and schedules to stand in the way of spontaneity or spending quality time with your child
It is good to follow schedules regularly as it helps lead a balanced life, but you must never allow schedules and daily routines to prevent spontaneity. For instance, you can take a few minutes before dinner to talk with your child or play their favorite game. It might be off-routine, but it will motivate your child to work harder tomorrow.
- Never curb your child’s creativity because the schedule doesn’t allow it
The schedule must be flexible so your child can breathe. If your child wishes to pursue some activity or talent, you must encourage your child. It would help if you let your child do things independently, allowing them to live up to their full potential. If you thwart their creative advances, they will become shy individuals scared to ask for what they want.
- Include leisure time in the schedule, so your child gets the much-needed downtime
Childhood isn’t about academics and extracurricular activities. It is also about allowing children to do what they want and discover their hidden talents and skills. So, you need to create a schedule that includes a few hours of leisure time when your child is free to do what they want. For example, they may want to play video games or watch TV. Let them do that before they have to get back to their routine. A little bit of free time will help them concentrate better on the tasks.
So, as you can see, it is all about finding the right balance and creating a schedule that works for your child and yourself. It may take a bit of trial and error to get it right. But you will soon discover what works for your kid.