Getting Kids Interested in School Activities

[Anglewannabe]

teens are known to rebel and if the way to rebel is to not join a school activity, personally, I think parents are getting off easy

As a teen I no longer wished to participate in school activities (story for another post). The more my dad pushed me to fit in, the more I rebelled. It did me more harm than good. I remember the school was having an activity day where it would be sports all day and no classes. Over half the kids used that as an excuse to stay home and sleep. My parents forced me to go and I spent over 8 hours in the gym locker room by myself fighting off the tears. Not good to force a kid

Now that I am an adult I join every activity I want to. No self esteem issues there. But one thing that does drive me nuts is the person at the activity that has no interest in the activity, they just came out because their boyfriend made them or they didn’t want to sit home alone.

Thinking twice before forcing a kid to join a group they don’t want. It puts a downer on everyone else’s fun time

Angie

 

[Xantippe]

I’ll note too that I went to public school, although it was definitely in an affluent area. But gym and a lot of other “enrichment” activities seem to be getting these in a lot of cases, which is too bad IMO.

Yes.

Our kids’ private school is excellent in many ways, but the PE/competitive sports situation is a mess. Basically, in the upper elementary years, they use the PE time for competitive sports practice and a lot of the time, the non-team members are left to twiddle their thumbs.

Then in the middle school years, they don’t do that during PE, but they sometimes don’t offer PE at all, or it’s only two days a week.

Plus, our two big kids are both a very poor fit for standard competitive sports but both do better in some more individual sports.

We also don’t have a lot of school-based extracurriculars.