Families For Life | Co-curricular Activities, Interests and Hobbies: Pre-teens and Teenagers

What pre-teens and teenagers get from co-curricular activities

Sports, drama, Scouts and Guides, hobbies like craft or photography – co-curricular activities can be just about anything your child enjoys outside of school. They can also be things you have encouraged your child to do, like language classes, music, debating, religious instruction, swimming, or paid and unpaid jobs.

Taking part in co-curricular activities can:

give your child a chance to try a range of activities and find things they are good at
give your child a sense of achievement and boost their self-esteem, confidence and resilience
promote good mental health and a sense of belonging
help your child meet other people with similar interests
keep your child busy with healthy and positive challenges like sports or community activity
help your child learn to handle responsibility, take initiative and solve problems.

Encouraging pre-teens and teenagers to try co-curricular activities

Not all pre-teens and teenagers are into co-curricular activities. That is fine.

Some pre-teens and teenagers are keen but just need a bit of help to get started with co-curricular activities. If this sounds like your child, you can talk with them to work out what they are interested in. You could find out what other pre-teens and teenagers do by talking to other families, looking in the newspaper or searching online. You could also help your child find out about their school’s clubs and societies.

Your child might need help to ease into a new group of people. After all, it can be hard to turn up to something new, especially if you do not know anyone. Perhaps your child has a friend who would like to do the activity with them. Or you could arrange for your child to meet someone who already does the activity.

Your child could also start an activity gradually. For example, if your child’s ultimate goal is to be on the stage with a local theatre group, they could start by working as a stagehand.

It is okay if your child does not do many, or any, co-curricular activities. Your child might feel that they get to try and enjoy plenty of things at school. Co-curricular activities are voluntary. If your child does not want to do an activity, it is best not to make them do it. They are unlikely to enjoy it and they would not benefit from it.

Finding the right balance with co-curricular activities

Balancing work and fun is a challenge for everyone – it is a life skill that is important for your child to learn.

If you are worried that your child has taken on too many co-curricular activities, you could watch for signs that things are out of balance. These might include your child being tired, grumpy or stressed or having trouble sleeping.

You and your child might be able to cope with this in short bursts, like around exams, at grand final time, or before a big performance. If your child is showing these signs at other times, it might be worth looking at how much they are doing.

To work out whether your child is doing too much, you could just ask them whether they feel they have the balance right.

Then you could have a look at these things:

Time away from home: how many nights does your child come home after 8.30 or 9 pm? How long are they out for on weekends? Can your child contribute to life at home, like doing their chores?
Balance of activities: how much sleep is your child getting? Do they have any down time? Can they get their homework done on time? Does your child have time for friends? Are they spending a lot of time in singing lessons and tennis practice, for example, at the expense of schoolwork or socialising?
Behaviour: does your child seem happy? Are they irritable? Do they seem stressed a lot of the time?
Effect on the family: how many family meals are missed, or disrupted, by your child’s activities? Is this a problem for your family? How often does your child miss family activities? Do your child’s activities mean other family members miss out on doing things?

Different children can balance different amounts of co-curricular activity. This changes with age too. What your child can handle when they are 9 will be different from what they can do at 13.

It can be hard to let your child stop doing an activity that they have been doing for a long time. But giving your child some responsibility to choose activities lets them know that you trust them to manage their own time and make the right decisions for themselves.

Working on time management for co-curricular activities

Talk with your child if you are concerned that they need a better balance between co-curricular activities and other areas of their life. You could try the steps for time management suggested below.

1. Introduce your concerns
If you tell your child that you have noticed they do not seem happy, seem tired, or seem too busy to do all the things they need to do, it can give them the chance to think about how they are spending their time and energy.

For example, you might say, “You seem so busy at the moment. I wonder if you have got too much on?” or “We need to consider how late the sessions are finishing, because you are not getting to bed until 10.30pm 3 nights a week”.

2. Work out how your child’s time is spent
You or your child could create a weekly chart, with details for each day’s activities and how long they take. You could go through the chart with your child and wait to hear what they say. What does your child think about how their week looks?

You could let your child know how things look to you. For example, “You must be struggling to find time for homework each night with this schedule”, or “There is not much time for just hanging out with family and friends in your week”.

Then you could say, “I wonder whether we need to think about this and come up with a better plan”.

3. Work out priorities
You might suggest that your child thinks about these questions:

What would I like to do more or less of?
What stuff is the most important to me?
What is important to us as a family?
What do I have to do, like schoolwork?

This gives your child the chance to think about the issue from their own point of view, rather than having you ‘solve’ the problem for them.

Once your child has thought about the questions above, you could talk together about their ideas for what might change. You can give feedback on the things you agree with or any problems you see.

For example, there might be activities that you would like your child to continue, but which they want to stop doing.

Telling your child why you want them to do an activity might help them sort out the pros and cons. You might say, “It is important that you learn to swim. It is too dangerous when you go to the beach if you cannot swim properly”. Or “I would like you to be able to speak a bit of Malay so that you can talk to your grandmother on the phone”.

It is ok if you want to point out your family’s priorities too. For example, “Sunday night dinner is important to us. It is something we really want to do as a family”.

You might negotiate with your child to stick with an activity for another term or 6 weeks, to see whether things improve.

4. Assess the plan
Your child is learning skills for managing time and setting priorities. If you let your child put their plan into action, it gives them the chance to practise these skills.

You and your child might need to tweak the new schedule along the way. It is about juggling your child’s desire to make things happen with the realities of how demanding certain activities are, how much time they take, and how possible it is for your family to manage it all.