Keeping Tweens in activities

[PrincessFiona]

So ... I have a friend on FB who is an ER doc. She homeschools her 4 kids but they are all active in debate clubs and play in orchestras. Her Tweens play in youth symphony orchestra. At least once a week she posts videos of them playing just to torture me.

How does she do it?

Aidan has quit orchestra but agreed to stick with lessons. Now he's trying to back out of lessons. I hate that he doesn't want to keep playing. He is good at it. I'm not willing to let him quit.

Next year at SJP he'll be required to play in the orchestra and so now he says he won't go to SJP.

What has happened to my easy-going Aidan. What do I do about the violin?

Kris


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[houseelf]

I truly have no earthly idea how people are making their lives work. Seriously. I am going to pretend to take an official survey and go from door to door asking how people get their kids to activities, save for retirement, stay married, have fulfilling careers, keep their house clean, blah, blah.
It's just too much.

My kids fight back if I ask for too much (See, e.g. thread that we made oldest child play a sport to keep him in A (SINGLE/ONE/UNO) activity).

[Meenah]

Parenting is such a hard gig!!!!!!

[Vanquisher]

Lexi loooooooves to swim. She'll spend all day in the pool. All day, wrinkled, prune-like, all day. She goes to swim practice every day for an hour. Every day. Meets on some weekends, and she will still want to swim on her days off. She'll spend all day watching science-based you tube channels and Ted talks. She will stay up at night to watch them and listen to world renowned scientists.

She also plays the violin. She has a concert tonight, in fact. Has she pulled out that violin one time to practice? No. Not even close. She doesn't want to.

Maybe those kids have some weird, crazy love for orchestra like Lexi does for swimming and nerdiness.

Maybe those kids are all doped up on drugs. Maybe they hate their mother. Who knows? I'd like to know how people get the ambition to do lots of shit. You're fine, I promise.

[ladymoreta]

What Heidi said!

Facebook is for posting the happy/good stuff. You really don't know what happens in between those videos, but I'm willing to bet you would rather have your own family's crazy than theirs.

[peggyfromwastate]

Keeping Tweens in activities

Who is at home with the kids while works? Does she have help? Homeschooling is an added 4 hours or so of time to the kids' days, I think, when you consider wasted time at school and homework at night. Plus activities like debate club and orchestra would be THE social activity. It's like flipping the scene- school is the organized extracurricular and homework is the homeschool work time.

Anyway I think it's pretty common for kids to sort of gravitate away from musical instruments at this age bc practicing commitment kicks up and it just takes a lot of time. A ton of time. I just got my kids back into music lessons and they are doing band at high school but I'm not sure how they will keep it up. They will go to swim daily bc that's where their best friends are. (Dd13 isn't really into it anymore but she doesn't want to miss her friends). Ds13 is committed to swimming and will train 2-4 hours daily but also likes music a lot. There is simply not enough time. And it sucks. I may have to homeschool him so he can do his extracurriculars. This is getting a little bit insane now I think.

But there it is.

We had some japanese swimmers stay at our house for a weekend/ it was an exchange type thing. Anyway their schedule is Japan is up for school at 7 and in school at 8, school until 5, homework, swim from 7-9pm, homework, bed at 12, repeat. I honestly don't know how kids or parents keep up with all this.

And, I'm kind of feeling like FB is the devil now. The Christmas card in perpetuity to make us all feel like slackers of like our lives really suck.

[Ladybug]

I quit piano in 9th grade too. I hated practicing. I wish I had kept playing, but I realize that my mom had to pick her battles at that point. My adult friends have both started piano lessons again. I play all of my kids piano songs and help them work out their pieces. I flove classical music and enjoy performances to this day. I consider the exposure my parents gave me to complex music to be one of the best gifts I've received in this life. Truly. I didn't stick it out for professional music, but I'm grateful every day for their gift. Don't ever think of it as a failure. I agree with Heidi that it must be an intrinsic drive. There's no other way.