I took the girls and two of their friends to see 101 Dalmatians: The Musical this afternoon. It was a good introduction to musical theatre, the story was familiar enough to follow along and the production was whimsical and child-friendly. If we had paid for a babysitter to go see it as a date, I probably would have been disappointed. But, that wasn’t the case, and the kids all had a great time, so I enjoyed it as well.
Parenting is one big adventure of shaping your children’s views of the world, life and everything, and doing things like this makes me consider how much we are exposing them to the arts. It makes me understand how people can get sucked in to over-scheduling with activity after activity because if you neglect one, you might miss a great gift or not develop a passion. I think we can all see how an excess of pursuits can tax a family in many ways, and distort a child’s view of his own importance, but drawing the line between good and too much can’t be easy.
How do you find balance in your family? Is it dictated by time, cost, number of pursuits per child?
Hey, Kristen. I’ve been thinking about this some recently. My parents have been such a blessing. They’ve purchased tickets to Columbus Children’s Theatre productions (for the big kids, R-girl not yet.) and other cultural places (Grandparent memberships to COSI and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum). I’m so thankful. They really enjoy going to plays/musicals as adults, and this has been a special thing they’ve done with M-girl & N-boy together and individually. We do a local kids gym one day a week and have signed up for soccer.
we have declared a rebellion against the culture of busyness. of course our kids are still pretty young (5, 4 and 1), but we try to be very aware of how busy we are. and frankly we are not high-energy folks.
so we’ve declared only one regularly-scheduled activity at a time: kindermusik last fall, swim class in the spring, maybe soccer in the fall, etc. we do take sporadic opportunities such as the Nutcracker and whatnot.
other than that I will not worry too much about neglecting an opportunity. we gladly share our passions (serving Jesus, music, needlecraft, reading, etc) and hope they rub off, but I’m content to wait for a spark to fan into flame, as opposed to running everywhere to make sure I’ve covered it all.
And both of you are homeschoolers, which to me puts even more pressure on you. Kate has spanish class at school, music class (art next year.) She has PE every day and will learn basic skills for sports. And I still am interested in developing more opportunities for arts and sports.
Both of my girls have done ballet. Kate is so anxious to start violin. Lexi wants to do acting classes as soon as possible. I think I will probably encourage all of those things.
I also want them to try soccer and t-ball. And maybe join the swim team this summer.
There are a lot of homeschool opportunities here. We’re doing Spanish at home (well, will be, but I have a curriculum & long ago Spanish experience in high school; plus several fluent speakers in our church & SIL). There’s a homeschool choir in our town, so next fall we’ll probably sign up for that (must be 5.5, M-girl just misses the cut off). The gym class they take has helped *so* much in their coordination and balance; M-girl is in gymnastics now after several months with N-boy in a “Sports Adventure” class, and even R-girl has a class to play in … it is expensive, but has been worth it.
We do try to keep the “every week” sort of activities at a minimum and they tend to be the “specials” from when I was in elementary school. I know some people would argue that we’re not providing anything more than what parents who have pub schooled kids provide, but we do try to incorporate these things (on a smaller scale) here at home.
No doubt, opportunities abound. I just meant that the pressure to provide those things falls only on you and if your child does not thrive (athletically, lets say) some moron will blame it on their homeschooling.
actually I think the “pressure” is off.
if we keep up with homeschooling, our kids will (theoretically) not be pressured to join all sorts of things all at once, but if we want to do stuff, there is an abundance of opportunity, especially in this town.
if we happen to go to “regular” school at some point, the pressure will be all the more to keep things sane.