Time to Register for After-School Activities – would I be a bad parent if we dropped chess club this year?

This week seems to be THE week that afterschool programs start taking registrations, which, for us parents means, greeting the sun rising as we sit by computers to snag those precious few places in Swim Club, or worse, queuing all night to get our precious ones into the right art class.

Are we bad parents if we don’t offer our children every extracurricular opportunity known to mankind? How important are afterschool activities for our children’s future success?

As school starts, we run ourselves ragged driving our ‘mostly tired’ kids all over town and we feel grumpy when they aren’t appreciative enough that we’re picking them up from their violin lesson at 7.30 pm on a Thursday evening.

And now we’re being told by the experts that there is no correlation between our overachieving ambitions and academic success? So before registering for their Fall activities, grab a cup of coffee and take a moment to read this article:Family Happiness and the Overbooked Child from the New York Times.