Few are the kids who are not aimed at extracurricular activities after school day. More and more experts indicate that our children are enduring a overload This can lead to high levels of stress, increase the risk of depression or suffer alterations in your relationship with family and friends.
The Child Development Research Society (SRCD) The US has held a conference in Montreal where a varied group of experts has addressed issues such as the affectation of these activities to academic performance or where the limit of activities for children is.
Jennifer Fredrick, participant in the seminar and Professor of Human Development at Connecticut College (USA) has commented that parents should seek balance and pay attention to the child's cues. If you seem to suffer stress, you need to reduce activities. Participation in these activities is beneficial as long as the parents look at whether or not the child gives signs of overload.
The same opinion is shown Andrea Mata of the Department of Psychology at Kent State University, which states that each child is unique and needs different amounts of time in extracurricular activities, emphasizing that parents should realize if their child is overwhelmed by this excess of activities.
In Spain, Michelangelo Diaz-Sibaja, of the Child and Youth Mental Health Unit of Algeciras Day Hospital, believes that Spanish children are overloaded with extracurricular activities, adding that this is another reflection of the society in which we live. Undoubtedly, this has a direct relationship with the work overload of the parents since most of these occasions, these activities are used, so that the child is busy or cared for, while the parents are working. This is neither good nor bad, although, like almost everything in this life, it has its advantages and disadvantages.
The pedagogical coordinator of the Altamira Children's School, Teresa Albuger Gil, defends that it is the children who choose the activities since it is not that they are chosen so that the parents project in them their own desires or frustrations or simply, because they occupy a time in which the parents cannot attend them. Nor should we believe that our children will be happier because let's make them super competent. The little ones must be given from the beginning the opportunity to decide what they want to do and to be consistent with those decisions.
Some research has found that children with excess of these classes have a higher risk of depression and loneliness compared to those who do an activity outside of moderate school hours.
Michelangelo Diaz-Sibaja, it is of the opinion that the child who goes to school and then to one or two extracurricular activities, when he comes home exhausted, has to do his homework and wonders if the parents will be wrong, responding in turn that Each act according to what you want for your children.
Sometimes parents think we do our best for our kids and force them thinking that they will be better prepared when they grow up, but the question is When do we leave the children of our children?If now that they can enjoy it, we don't let them when will they do it?
Image | Aaron Jacobs In Sin and More | The game is the best extracurricular activity according to the Children's Game Observatory
