I was woken up at 5:30 in the morning by the cheerful sounds of Ian singing a Thomas song while sitting on the toilet. He usually sleeps until 7, so we’re guaranteed some crankiness, but it did crack me up.
He and Jonah are snuggled under a blanket watching Ben 10 right now. It’s a day off for them, but not for me. This must be a very quick post.
Ian is doing great. I am going to have to set up a meeting with his school in a couple of weeks. He’s in a special needs class right now. It’s part of the same program as last year, but he’s got a new teacher and we are still working out the transition kinks. She’s not quite sure what to do with a kid with a high IQ. She’s giving him the same dumbed down work that she gives the other kids in the class. That’s not cool.
Smart kids who happen to be in special needs class for other reasons should do exactly the same work as kids in the mainstream class. Period. End of story. Even if it takes them twice as long. Even if special modifications have to be made.
Jonah just made the traveling soccer team. It’s going to crap up the schedule with three practices and a game per week. Shoot me now.
Apt. 11d 
“It’s going to crap up the schedule with three practices and a game per week. Shoot me now. ”
Super ugh. No such worries in our life right now, and I’m happy about that one.
Glad to hear that Ian is doing well.
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Soccer is the great monkey wrench in every parent’s life.
My friend has a son who is super brilliant- 4th grade and doing calc and beyond in math, equally brilliant in science, and is at a high school level in lit, but can’t write. He has dyscgraphia?? (not sure of the spelling or the name). He seriously can’t even make the letters for his name. The gifted and talented program balked at having him, because he has to have an aide to even help with typing. But the kid needs to be challenged. His mom has been fighting and advocating for this kid for five years and is thinking of homeschooling and hiring private tutors, but she can’t afford it.
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Absurd piece of trivia; many (perhaps all) of the Thomas songs are written by Junior Campbell, of the sixties band The Marmalade (a very good band — try them on youtube or last fm, I bet your kids’ll like them)
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Laura,
There’s no federal law (yet) that says that he has to do the traveling soccer team.
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That reminds me, I have to learn the rules for soccer soon. The only thing I know is that only the goalies can use hands.
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“I have to learn the rules for soccer soon”
22 men play for 90 minutes, and in the end the Germans win. Easy.
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Hey, Doug
http://www.nbcolympics.com/soccer/photos/galleryid=244215.html
Men? Germans?
bj
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Amy P is right. Nobody Jonah’s age should have a professional training schedule. (Not only is there no law that he has to do it, there should be a law against it).
However, his choice set is not between a professional training schedule on the one hand, and a team with players roughly around his ability with a sensible schedule on the other. All the kids who are any good and take it at all seriously are being driven by a combination of parent pressure, peer pressure, and the demands of the infrastructure into the professional training schedule. So he has a choice between that on the one hand and playing with people who don’t care much on the other. (I’m just guessing, from my own experience, that this is Laura’s).
I’d like to keep my kids out of these kinds of activities, basically. But if I did, they would never see friends. (One 11 year old I know is scheduled for two activities every single day), and they would hate me. (Fortunately, the toddler seems to be totally anti-social so far, so maybe I’ll get to see more of him).
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“So he has a choice between that on the one hand and playing with people who don’t care much on the other.”
Unfortunately, this seems to be true of much more than soccer. My daughter turned down an opportunity to participate in an irish dance ceili, ’cause, she told us, “she doesn’t plan on being a professional irish dancer.”
So, kids are hearing the message that unless you’re going to be “professional” you might as well not do it on one side. On the other side, a child who has a true love of something — I’ve been amazed watching the focus and joy with which some of the other kids play soccer — can only indulge that love in the A team.
We’re facing this concern with drama; my daughter loves it. But, does this mean that I start sending her on auditions? I think there’s going to be a middle road, that will give her the joy without the anguish, but I think that’s tougher with sports.
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“I’d like to keep my kids out of these kinds of activities, basically. But if I did, they would never see friends. (One 11 year old I know is scheduled for two activities every single day), and they would hate me.”
This morning, my six-year-old told me that she wanted to stay home from school and just do her ballet and CCD (both of which are today). On Wednesdays, we just barely manage to sandwich dinner between the two activities, we get home, her homework gets a very abbreviated treatment (the book on tape she listened to in the car gets counted as her 15 minutes of reading), and then she goes to bed. I’d also like to work in one playdate every week.
There are a couple other things I’d like her to do (like swimming and soccer), but I’m holding back for the following reasons:
1. Saving money (her ballet outfit cost about $60 for tights, leotard, and shoes and we pay $40 a month)
2. Saving time
3. Saving gas (see #1)
4. Keeping time and money available for physical therapy later in the fall, which will probably be two days a week
5. Keeping evenings leisurely and allowing slow-paced playtime with younger brother
6. Saving me (i.e. I don’t have the energy or the driving skills to spend all afternoon driving C places and then have D wait around for her activity to be over)
7. Avoiding the dread fast food dinner. What’s the point of all these wonderful physical activities if in between, the kids have a burger and fries? (see #1 and #6)
If I’m on the ball over the next few weeks, I’d like to try to find parents from school interested in meeting at the children’s museum after school once a week. The zoo is reasonably close, too, but it’s less suitable for squeezing in before dinner.
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I’ve lately been reading some books on children and friendship. Fred Frankel (author of “Good Friends are Hard to Find”) is very down on over-scheduling and says that group activities are not a substitute for one-on-one playdates in building friendships.
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Unfortunately, this seems to be true of much more than soccer.
I agree; this has certainly been the case for our oldest daughter (Megan, now 12). For her, it was gymnastics and diving. In both cases, she enjoyed the activity very much…but in neither case did she really care to put in the effort and submit to the regiment which the organizers of the activity were pushing so as to enable their students to compete (and win). She just wanted to dive, or flip around on bars occasionally; she found it fun. We wanted her to be able to keep having fun, but ultimately we agreed that lending our encouragement to the pressure she was dealing with at the gym or the pool (even if it might have pushed her into a way of thinking and behaving that she might someday have been grateful for…she really does show a lot of talent in diving) wasn’t fair to her. So, she pulled out of both, and we let it go. Piano we’re forcing her to stick with, but gymnastics and diving, as much as she misses her friends at the gym and the pool, we don’t feel right committing ourselves to.
In general, we’re highly suspicious of today’s regimentation of the world of play. Unfortunately, with so many dual-income families, so many transient and suspicious neighborhoods, and so many kids already scheduled to the hilt, the playgrounds and such are often empty. You do what you can, I guess.
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8. C and I have started biking together in the evening after dinner, and I’d like to do it as often as possible. She has some balance and strength issues, and until we figure out what kind of physical therapy would be most suitable, we’re hoping that ballet and biking will be helpful.
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I’m with Harry — I have tried hard not to overschedule my kids. And at first I was successful. As Amy suggests, we would do spontaneous play dates or cultural activities instead of scheduled activities. And that worked for a while … but pretty soon you take the hint, when the fourth invite to a play date is turned down because everyone else is at tae kwon do, or soccer, on and on it goes. Same with the zoo or the museum: you notice that once again you’re the only one there with kids older than 5, and you know you have to do something different.
Truth be told, much of my reluctance has to do with me not wanting to take on the scheduling and franticness burden. But for everyone’s sake I’ve had to relent a bit on girl scouts, piano lessons, and art class. Soccer I’ve avoided, thank god. Lucky I don’t have hyper boys, that’s all I have to say.
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Ugh. Is this what you people in political science refer to as a collective action problem? Or is it more a prisoner’s dilemma? What people are saying about extracurriculars reminds me of my decision-making process before sending my oldest to preschool. I wasn’t convinced that it was necessary, but then I noticed that there weren’t any 3 or 4-year-olds at the playgrounds during the day, so I went with the crowd.
On the other hand, how many people can afford to go all-out on extracurriculars? Allegedly “everybody” is doing it, but not everybody has that kind of money.
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Soccer is actually one of the less intense boys’ sports around. The baseball and football sports are insane. The parents are so into it that that they kill the fun. Dads take their kids to batting cages two or three times a week. ESPN is always on in the house. They are constantly training with their dads or the team. Soccer is great, because the gonzo sports dads are else where.
Jonah is a B+ athlete. Sports are good for him, because he is a super high energy person who really needs to burn off steam. If he wasn’t doing a sport, I would have to make him do laps around the house or something.
But this schedule is stupid. I’ll see how much he likes it and if it interferes with homework. I’m carpooling with a neighbor, so that should help out a bit. I’ll pull him out if things get too crazy.
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We’re sort of hoping our son takes to soccer (when he’s older) for the reasons you mention. That and the fact that he’ll be lucky if he tops out at 5’10”.
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Yep, its a classic collective action problem, and one that is very hard to solve (despite my quip about needing a law against it, I don’t think this is one for the government!). I, too, sometimes wodner whether my feelingas about this are mainly because I am selfish — I don’t want to be carting them around everywhere and I want time with them that is unstructured and relaxing (eg, I’d like to watch TV with them more!). But Amy’s #5 weighs heavily with me — I worry about their social and emotional development in the intense atmospheres they are subjected to (basically by adults who are the people organising this stuff) and want them to have liesurely time with each other (I have 3, wth fairly big gaps between them).
Oh, and yes, I know that for boys soccer is the least intense sport, because it is the one that boys with fathers who are not obsessed with football basketball or baseball allow them to do. But for girls it is a bit different: there isn’t the same peeling off of the natural atheletes into corporate sports that there is for boys, so you get this super-intense environment (not, I suspect, as super-intense as irish dancing, at least according to my irish dancing student who made it sound horrendous!)
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I did Irish dancing up until high school, when my mom (the only person in the house without Irish genes) finally let me quit. It may have been intense for the girls, but for the guys it was unmasculine to care. One day, years later, I was watching some Irish dancers and I suddenly realized the error I kept making that my teacher kept trying to correct. The same thing happened with swimming. I did that for 7 or 8 years, but it wasn’t until I was near 30 that the proper way to do the kick in the crawl just hit me one day.
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9. I asked C tonight if there were other activities that she’d like to do, and she said that ballet and CCD were enough.
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MH,
There’s a memorable scene or two about Irish dancing in the movie version of Angela’s Ashes.
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Ian’s placement: Have you studied From Emotions to Advocacy? Are you a follower of the Way of Pete Wright? (sorry, gratuitous Terry Pratchett reference).
Anyway, if you haven’t, I highly recommend the book & the Wrights’ approach to special education advocacy for you and for Ian.
On the whole kids and sport issue: (my kids are now 30, 28, and 19)
Personally, I’m not a great fan of “traveling teams” for most kids. Yes, my stepsons all played league sports. The boys weren’t on year-round teams (which the traveling teams tend to be). Yes, my daughter participated in three year-round athletic activities (tumbling, met twice a week all year) equestrian sports (three to four days a week, all year round) and Tae Kwon Do (three to four days a week, all year round). She started TKD a couple of years after the tumbling involvement came to an end, so there was never all three at once. The tumbling was non-competitive — just a recital once a year. We controlled how many equestrian competitions she entered. And the TKD had the odd competition.
But here’s the deal: the equestrian activity had a home base, not just teams meeting at some random field. In the summer, I’d drop her off at the barn at say 9 am and pick her up in the afternoon. She was part of a tribe or clan of kids of all ages — they rode, cleaned, studied and played. The TKD also had a home base, the dojo or studio. Kids would treat the dojo like study hall and/or playdates — goofing around for an hour, then class.
So you have to really analyze what the activity adds and subtracts to your family. Oh — and team sports vs. individual sports make a difference. If the darling daughter decided to drop out of one of her sports — it wasn’t a commitment to a group; her decision wouldn’t have hurt the team.
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One thing I find interesting is what I hear from kids who are now young adult products of these ultra-competitive environments. My girls have cousins by marriage, including a couple who have done very intense competitive swimming and dance. They are now 20 and 17, and they counsel — very strongly — that my kids not do it. I guess you need to wait a few years to really know the adult outcome, but I found that thought-provoking.
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My daughter is in “competitive” dance, I guess. They do 1 or 2 competitions a year. But it’s lowkey, and our emphasis is on the idea that you exercise, practice, and learn a routine and do your best. And that’s the studio’s philosophy, too.
My son is only 6. He’s done soccer, t-ball, and tennis. He loved tennis but we dropped the ball, so to speak, on getting him into a fall class at the Y. But he’s doing guitar lessons, so I’m not anxious to add anything in.
I feel brilliant because my daughter’s dance class is Thursday afternoons, so I scheduled his guitar lesson for during her dance class. Win!
They’re still young, so I’m glad to have them home in the afternoons. And like Harry, I’m a big believer in unstructured time, even if I do let them watch tv a lot. But I’m telling you, Fetch with Ruff Ruffman can be damned educational.
In other news, thanks to JibJab and our watching their cartoons together (we also like to play with the Starring You vids), she was the only kid in her class to know the name of the VPOTUS.
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Bah! We love Fetch at our house. I am also a HUGE fan of Sid the Science Kid. (I’ll skip on the Suite Life of Zack & Cody.)
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But, didn’t Laura love to run? We have to listen to her, too.
She’s spoken fondly of what that gave her. As a physical slug myself (who never participated in sports to any significant degree), I really do believe that physical activity can be very empowering for girls, both physically and mentally.
I think the difficult thing is to figure out where to draw the line. My daughter is advocating for adding another class to her schedule, and I think I’ll let her do it, ’cause she’s pushing for it. It also feels hectic in the beginning, when you’re trying out out different things to find the ones your kid seems to really get into.
(But, in terms of standing down — if you really don’t want to take these types of classes, and you want your kids to have unstructured time, you have to work to build that social circle for them for the unstructured time. It’s possible. I see people do it, by choosing neighborhoods, organizing casual regular potlucks, home school gatherings, and the like.
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My son just put Sid the Science Kid on the TiVO Season Pass. We have way too many shows there, alas. Even though my son has watched every Zoboomafoo to the point where he can educate the docents at the local zoo, he still insists on having a ready supply of available episodes.
My favorite Fetch episode still is the one where they had to warn the patriots that the Regulars were coming. We had so much fun last April walking the Freedom Trail and recollecting the info form the episode.
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Cheer up – after watching some Disney episode – my girls took up fencing. I wish it was soccer. At least there are no swords – if we keep it up for 10 years there may be a scholarship attached that will probably equal all the money we spent on lessons – lol.
Though there is something empowering about watching your girls going after a guy with a sword.
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