In recent years, especially this generation of children (2007), it has become a norm for parents to send their children for extracurricular activities. Having some extracurricular activities for children is good as this fills up children's time positively with valuable skills and learning experience. However, having too many extracurricular activities will cause burnout for both children and parents. If we want to send our children for extracurricular activities, we need to limit the number of activities to a manageable number for our children. Like us, our children need free time to rest, play and do nothing.

Following are some tried and tested ways which we suggest:
1.Choose and select a limited number of activities such that it is manageable for parent and children.
We ask ourselves the following questions:
a.Is the activity good for our children in the long run?
b.Do our children show some interest in it?
c.Do we and our children have the time and resources to participate in the activity?
d.Is the time and location suitable with our current schedule?

2.Choose the activities nearer to home with suitable timing on weekends or weekday evenings to allow transport arrangements.
a.Select the most suitable timing for our children taking the activities. For example, if we have more than one child taking classes from the same centre, we can select the days and timing that falls back to back so that we arrange transport without much hassle or inconvenience.
b.During the activity time, we can arrange our routine errands, like grocery purchase, marketing or settling some banking matters and so forth. With proper pre-planning, the regular extracurricular activities will fall nicely in place with parents' routine.

3.Car pool and enroll in the same centre or location with our siblings if they have children of about the same age. This proves a very helpful arrangement for all of us which are a win-win and also inter-family bonding time. We send our children together and meet up with them regularly after the activities. We take turns to send the children if required, especially as the activity timings are on the same day at about the same time or running back to back. When either set of parent are unable to fetch their children, we help each other out by having the other set of parents fetch them for that day.

4.For weekday afternoon activities, we sometimes consider getting the teacher to go to our home about once a week. This allows our children to have some scheduled activity while we are at work. In Singapore, there are some extracurricular activities like tuition, art or music classes where some teachers conduct their lessons at the children's home.

While it is good for our children to get some extracurricular activities, we need to take note to LIMIT the number of activities to AVOID BURNOUT in our children and us.

Learn more about this author, Tammy Lim.
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