How to Choose Extracurricular Activities

Soccer? Dance? Basketball? Piano lessons? Swim team? Debate team? Choir?

There are so many extracurricular activities for kids that it can make your head spin.

At some point in your homeschooling career, you will have to decide: What are we going to do about extracurricular activities for our children?

Many homeschoolers these days have a lot of the same options for activities as students in public school, with homeschool sports teams and co-op options available in some communities.  It can be overwhelming for those families to decide what to choose – especially since time and money are often in short supply for homeschooling families. It is also easy to get sucked into the extracurricular activity vacuum: Everyone is doing it, so my kid should be, too. Right?

Not necessarily.

One of the reasons we homeschool in our family is to have more family time. To not have to be running around willy-nilly all day every day with barely a moment to speak to one another.

Extracurricular activities can easily take over family life, making the schedule king over more important things. Before I know it, hustle and bustle and life-on-the-go squeeze out relaxed, comfortable home life, and, at least in my household, none of us is better for it.

So we’ve had to make some choices. But how? How do you choose?

Choosing Extracurricular Activities For Kids

Our family uses some basic guidelines to determine, for each child, what extracurricular activities we will participate in. These guidelines have helped us to make sure that the activities our kids join are worth the time, money, and energy – and that we will ultimately be glad we chose them.

Our guidelines are a series of questions that we ask about any potential extracurricular activities we are considering for a particular child. If the activity adequately addresses the question, we can move on to the next question. If it does not, then that activity is automatically out—we know the child is not going to be allowed to participate in it.

The truth is that we only have limited time with our children. We want that time and how we use it to be spent wisely!

When children are young, these questions are primarily addressed by their parents. However, as children get older, families should discuss the guidelines with them and help them be a part of the decision-making process.

Here are our guidelines for choosing extracurricular activities, in approximate order of significance from most important to least important:

1.    How well does the activity support the values we consider most important for our children?

We start with the activity's values. If it does not support our family’s values, there is no need to consider anything else—it’s a “no-go.” For us, those values include our faith beliefs and our values around character.

So, for example, music lessons (voice or instrument) support our family’s values because we believe music is a wonderful way to learn discipline, express worship, and minister to others. Soccer would also make the cut, as it teaches self-discipline, cooperation with others, and perseverance and encourages physical health and wellness.

 2.    What is the long-term benefit of the activity for this child?

Time is precious—especially time with children. We want our children to use their time wisely and engage in activities that will have long-term benefits.

Sure, camps and fun and time at the skating rink are enjoyable, but if we are going to invest time and money over a period of time in an activity, we want it to contribute to our child’s development and character over the long haul.

As a parenthesis to this question, we often ask ourselves, “What is the likelihood of our child continuing to participate in or benefit from this activity when he or she is no longer school-age?”

Under this question, both music lessons and soccer practice would still be in the running, because both have the opportunity to contribute benefits that would positively impact our children later on in life.

However, for our family, music might edge out soccer just a bit in this category because music is something they will likely do for the rest of their lives, whereas they are not as likely to play soccer much past their school years. Soccer would still be in the running, but we’d have to look more closely at it and weigh its costs and benefits with future questions.

3.    How does the activity correspond with this child’s natural talents, abilities, strengths, and interests?

We try to avoid “one-size-fits-all” extracurricular activities (or anything else, for that matter). We try to look at each of our children as individuals, and to determine their natural strengths and interests and find extracurricular activities that support them.

Sometimes, when children are young, it is difficult to know what their talents and interests will be. In those cases, we generally either wait until our children are old enough to begin to show their natural strengths and passions, or we will try an activity that we know, because of family history, they are likely to have an interest in or affinity for.

For example, both my husband and I have musical abilities. Therefore, it is highly likely (although not guaranteed) that music is an area in which our children will excel as well, so the odds are pretty good that music lessons will be in most of their futures.

In our house, however, it's not a given that everyone will be on a sports team. If one child shows a particular affinity for team sports and/or demonstrates interest in playing, then we will consider asking the rest of the questions in this list about that activity for that particular child.

One of our daughters, interestingly, has the perfect body for playing sports – but not a competitive bone in her body. She is more likely to pick daisies on the field than kick the ball. So, at this point in our guidelines, we would rule out soccer for her. On the other hand, she is very creative and has shown a unique talent for and interest in making clothes for her dolls. As a result, we have procured sewing lessons for her, and she is thriving in the activity.

We want extracurricular activities to correspond with each child’s God-given strengths and passions so that they support our efforts in helping each child become who he or she was created to be and our efforts in aiding each child to be most effective at using his or her talents in a way to bless others.

 4.    How often does it meet and, therefore, how much will it infringe on family life?

This is a significant question for us because one of the major reasons we homeschool is to prioritize family time. We are willing to transport children to activities that will adequately address the above questions, but only if the activities do not compromise our ability to maintain a relaxed, family-focused rather than schedule-focused home life.

Music lessons, at once a week, would fit this criteria just fine, but soccer might not make the cut, with three-times-a-week practices and weekend games.

However, this question would have to be weighed against the others in terms of costs and benefits. If, for example, one of our children showed the potential for significant physical talent and demonstrated a very strong interest in playing soccer (such that we thought it might become a long-term career or important factor in that child’s adult life), we might be willing to accept the infringement on family life that multiple practices and games per week might impose – due to the long-term benefit for that child.

The important point is that there would have to be a significant benefit to the child in other areas for our family to justify participating in an activity that took up a lot of time, energy and resources.

5.    How much does it cost?

As a (primarily) one-income family, we must live on a budget. We cannot shell out hundreds of dollars per child for multiple activities, so we have to choose our activities wisely.

If an activity effectively answers all of the other previous questions, then we will likely do what is necessary to pay for that activity for the child (if it is in our budget to do so). Even if, say, music lessons were a stretch on the budget, if such an activity adequately addressed all of the other questions and was clearly something highly beneficial for our child, we might make additional sacrifices or necessary changes to the budget to afford it.

However, going through all of the previous questions helps to ensure that we do not waste money on activities that are not going to ultimately be worthwhile for our children. The process narrows down the potentially huge number of extracurricular activities for which we could pay to just one or two, making it much more reasonable to be able to fund them.