Driving my daughter to school this morning, I heard my morning radio show discussing a new study out that says if you want your kids to be passionate about art or athletics, you need to leave them alone.

Published in the latest Journal of Personality, the study was a collaboration with scientists from the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montreal and McGill University. And, according to Yahoo! News LiveScience, the study “focused on what psychologists call autonomy, the basic need to feel like you’re acting based on your own values and desires, not those of others. Controlling parents chip away at their child’s autonomy, by pushing them into a hobby, the researchers say. So when the kid picks up his clarinet it’s not out of a desire to play music, but due to a sense of obligation or a fear of disappointing his parents.”

The morning show hosts were divided about the results, with some pointing out the benefits of parents pushing kids to stick with things like piano lessons.  As one blogger said (in a post with a title I loved - ”They Say: Leave Those Kids Alone“): ”It’s a tough balance for parents to strike. We want our kids to learn the art of perseverance. We don’t want them to quit simply because they aren’t getting their way. Often pushing them to stick with it just another game or practice allows them the chance to finally ‘get’ how to make that jump shot or master ‘Three Blind Mice.’”

Me? I had a total flashback to when I faced that decision a couple of years ago. I blogged here then about my daughter’s desire to quit piano and got a lot of great feedback from our readers.

Today, our daughter’s only extra-curricular is Girl Scouts, but we do continue to make music accessible to her by providing her with instruments to experiment on in her own play (Santa didn’t bring her the full drum set she asked for this year, but compromised with a much smaller digital drum that’s, expectedly, seen a small amount of use). She is still expressing no real passion for an instrument, but does talk about voice lessons. And, very recently, she’s begun to talk about joining a swim team, which seems like a good fit because she is such a fish in our own backyard pool.

So, as we contemplate these activities, I’ll be heading into them with good advice our readers gave me before, and now also scientific study to help me feel better about not pushing too hard. That’s the sort of balance one of the study’s author’s talks about.

“I’m not telling parents to let their kids do whatever they want without limits,” Mageau said. “The most important message is to focus on the child’s interests and not to impose one’s own on them.”

Laura P. Thomas is the wife of a former rocker and mother of one 5-year-old girl that’s already waaay too interested in The Jonas Brothers. (the apple didn’t fall far) She works in the Global Online team at Dell, evangelizes virtual worlds, and twitters too much as LPT.

I was talking to my mother the other night and she asked if my daughter was getting excited about school yet. Well, she’s been ready to start kindergarten for many months now, so that excitement has not abated; but, the full-bore, counting-down-the-days sort of excitement has not hit yet. Probably because I’m still putting off buying school supplies - put that list somewhere where I wouldn’t lose it way back in April when we first registered for class, and of course, can’t remember where that was. That said, I myself have become very aware of another sort of shopping that needs to be done sooner rather than later.

The Extra-Curricular Investment
Last year was probably the last year I got to pay no heed to the school-year calendar. I went to work, she went to preschool, and our routine was undisturbed. Sometime around September, however, I noticed that many of her classmates were apparently doing things like gymnastics and dance after preschool. The extra-curricular activities had already begun and we’d missed registration time! Horrors!

Luckily, a new extra class was soon offered at her pre-school - ballet - and I signed her up for that in addition to the extra Spanish class in which she was already enrolled. This year it won’t be so easy.
She also wanted to do the extra art class, and the extra “fun bus” class, and the extra computer class, but I drew the line at two monthly payments. For one thing, they already did arts in her regular classroom. (”But, they do ‘real’ art in the classes, Mom!”) And, rolling around on mats in an old school bus just didn’t look like high ROI to me. (”But, it’s FUN, Mom!”) And, my little Webkinz collector already knows her way around a computer all too well. (no whining about missing that class)
All of those were offered at her preschool and the extra cost was my only reason to limit her involvement.

This year it won’t be so easy.

Over-scheduled or Overweight
Now that we’ll be in “real” school that lets out before I’m off work, takes holidays I don’t take, and requires driving to extra-curricular activities the choices get that much more complicated.
On the ParentZone site I hear that: “The pluses of participating in activities for children are obvious. Children learn in all realms of development. Listening to a note in music class triggers connections in the brain that will be used later when solving math problems.”
Not to mention, we hear every day about the dangers of childhood obesity. I don’t want my daughter to become some troglodyte playing video games all day.
But, inversely, there’s also the fear of creating an over-scheduled kid. Neither she or I need the stress of trying to drive all over town every day to attend multiple classes or play weekend sports tournaments.
Navigating all this won’t be so easy.

Parental Pressure
So what’s a parent supposed to do? On the one hand, participation is good for our kids. Then, there’s that pressure we all feel to have our kids be as smart, talented or athletically inclined as everyone else’s. And, then, there’s the fear that we’ll push them too far. Will my desire to have her love ballet as much as I did (didn’t she get the memo?) or my wish for her to be musically talented like her father cause me to place too much pressure on her?
The Scholastic site says “Experts who study these issues usually find that most extra activities offer, at best, minor benefits for raising successful human beings and, at worst, can be overwhelming and taxing for our children.”
Other experts say it is all a matter of balance. (Isn’t everything in life?) We just have to figure out how to give our kids plenty of time to just “chill” and learn how to entertain themselves. We should also plan family time for simple things like board games.
And, we’re supposed to give our employers their due. While taking time for ourselves. And giving time to our spouse. And baking cupcakes for the kids’ class. And attending a Bible study to enrich our marriage. And making sure everyone has clean underwear to wear each morning. And getting the kids to school on time with their homework done. And, and, and.
Balancing this is not going to be so easy.

What To Do About It
OK, so I can’t solve all of those issues and relieve all that parental pressure. At least I can focus on making good choices about how many and what extra-curricular activities my soon-to-be-kindergartner can enjoy.
Scholastic has a nice grade-by-grade guidelines list on how much activity is appropriate.  According to them, one or two after-school activities a week are more than enough. They also say to wait until they already adjusted to the daily school routine, but there’s that looming deadline to get registered before classes fill up. I think we’ll be OK on that one, though, because my daughter has been in daycare (which we’ve always called “school”) since she was two months old, so all she’s ever known is the routine of getting up and going to school.
So, now all I’ve got to do is decide which activity and where. Ballet is, of course, still on the top of my list. Do we sign up for the “good” school now? The one that is affiliated with the professional troupe in town? Or do something a little closer to our neighborhood to start out simple? There are at least three different schools in a five mile radius of me. Which one is best? Which offers classes convenient to my work schedule? When will I find time to go visit them and talk to the teachers to be sure my daughter gets the best foundation and we get the return on our tuition?
This is not going to be so easy.