Useful, cumulative, and brief: A manifesto for kids’ activities

Plus: my c. 2003 Charles Dickens plan, unfair criticism, and more

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Useful, cumulative, and brief: A manifesto for kids’ activities

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Someone I know has two children in elementary school. They have activities. One evening every week, between the two of them, she spends her entire post-work evening in the car, not arriving home or getting dinner until after 8.

This is miserable, and while I admittedly speak from the happy ignorance of having children too young (or, at least, too unaware of what other kids are doing) to demand activities, I am determined never to find myself in comparable circumstances. And this is not—or not only—selfish; I think the situation is bad in its own right, above and beyond its effects on the parental chauffeur.

To that end, an informal manifesto of how I’m presently thinking about activities to come, with all due acknowledgement of not knowing what I don’t know:

1. Activities should be useful, with “useful” being understood broadly, individually, and with an eye to long-term practice. Of course, what’s useful for one person will not be useful for another. (I know someone who attributes much of his career success in sales to what he learned playing sports in high school, whereas I see zero connection between my career and my high school extracurriculars, weekend jobs excepted. I gained much more from spending endless hours reading alone.) And an educated guess about what may prove useful for a 5- or 10-year-old might not pan out. But for all those qualifications, usefulness is—or should be—a criterion here.

   1. A low-equipment and/or solo sport like track or soccer is more likely to be useful as a long-term fitness option than a high-equipment team sport like hockey, fencing, or football.

      1. I say this as someone who hasn’t fenced in 19 years but runs regularly.

      2. Note that I’m speaking in terms of probability, not absolutes. You likely know an exception to this rule; I too know an adult in a hockey league. That doesn’t change the big-picture math.

   2. Some sports, like swimming and ice skating, are socially useful on top of their usefulness as a physical activity. Swimming also has the substantial advantage of being a skill that can save your life.

   3. Usefulness does not preclude fun, artistry, or creativity. Learning to play the piano, sketch, whittle, knit, or sew is likely to be useful. A technique-heavy dance like ballet, on the other hand … probably not useful long-term for most people in an informal, low-ritual society like ours. Instruments (like standing bass) that generally aren’t played solo are less likely to see long-term use than those (like guitar, piano, or violin) commonly played by themselves.

   4. Almost universally high-use activities include: learning new languages; public speaking or debate; anything to do with food cultivation or preparation; anything to do with making, modifying, or mending common household goods; and having a job (especially one involving in-person customer service).

2. Activities should be cumulative. Jumping around and trying lots of new things is understandably appealing to kids. It is also typically expensive and imprudent. Sometimes you need to quit or switch, yes, but generally speaking, the presumption should be that you will do the same activity over multiple years and, if changing to a new activity, select something that somehow benefits from what you learned in the previous arrangement.

   1. For many children, this will preclude activities at a very young age, because activities for small kids impart little in the way of durable skills.

      1. What I’m saying is toddlers don’t need to play organized soccer.

      2. Don’t put your 1.5-year-old in ballet. (This caution is, unfortunately, inspired by a true story.)

      3. Seriously, spare yourself and them.