John Rosemond: When Children Grow Up…

When your children grow up, their most valuable childhood time will have been spent within the family unit. Soccer, dance and piano lessons won’t count for much, if anything, when they become adults. No matter how good your kids are at these extracurricular pursuits, the chances of them earning a living at soccer, etc., is miniscule.

The more a family’s time is taken up with extracurricular activities, the more the “classroom of the family” shrinks, and the more stress the family must absorb. It is within the classroom of the family that character lessons are taught and learned. A soccer coach can’t teach those sorts of things; he or she can only reinforce them.

The problem is not with any one activity, but with the spate of them (and I consider more than one activity per child at any given time a “spate”). A family is people growing together, not people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to meet deadlines and fulfill obligations, most of which are arbitrary. Do you want your children to grow up remembering relaxed family evenings, or do you want them remembering that almost every evening was a “hurry up, we gotta go!” occasion?

An easy choice, I’d say.

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