Does car-free living prevent over-scheduled kids?
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It’s a real dilemma for modern parents. How much organised activity is too much? On one hand we want our children to experience as many interesting activities as possible. And individually there is so much to be said for each activity. Learning to swim is an essential life skill. Ballet or drama helps build confidence and express creativity. New languages are best learnt when a child is young. Football or netball or gymnastics increase their physical activity in an age where we are bombarded with messaging about the dangers of childhood obesity. Cubs or Brownies offer a whole range of fun activities and are a great chance to learn teamworking skills. And so on and so on.
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The problem is that we also read articles talking about childhood burn-out, the danger of over-scheduling and over-stimulating our children and the importance of substantial amounts of time for free play, even for allowing kids to get bored. Where should that line be drawn?
So where do cars (or the lack of them) come in?
I am going to make a controversial argument which is that not owning a car acts as a natural filter on how many activities your child gets enrolled for, and is therefore a natural break on over-scheduling.
It is often used to me as an argument for car ownership – parents saying that they could never manage to get multiple children to multiple activities on multiple nights of the week without a car. Very probably that is so. But I don’t think my children have ever missed out on anything they really wanted to do because of our carlessness, but it has perhaps removed the temptation to shoehorn more and more into their schedules.
My now 12yo has had swimming lessons since she was 4. She was lucky enough to go to a school which offered a wide range of after school extra-curricular activities, and through that she has tried athletics, football, French, art, choir, drama and gardening (not all at the same time!). She has also been to drama club, gymnastics and netball out of school and tried horse-riding and ice-skating. At the time of writing we are in lockdown, but she has recently started secondary school and when life returns to normal she is looking forward to signing up for trampolining and debating clubs at her new school.
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It’s a bit harder to tell with my 6yo, because the world of after-school clubs and activities has been a closed one since she was only a few months into Reception. However, she went to Monkey Music classes as a baby and toddler, and started swimming lessons when she was 5 – we get to those by bike. Hopefully, it won’t be long before she can enjoy some of the activities at primary school that her sister enjoyed.
When limits aren’t the same thing as limitations
What organised activities our children do with their free time is undoubtedly limited by the logistics of our car-free lifestyle. But sometimes limits are a good thing. We have chosen to live in London where there is excellent public transport and increasingly safe cycling routes, which between them mean that there aren’t many places you can’t get to if you really want to. If my child develops a violent passion for learning synchronised swimming, and the only available lessons are an hour away at Ponders End, then we would get her there (and long walks or bus journeys are, incidentally, an excellent opportunity for tween children to open up about what’s on their minds). However, I wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic to spend hours of my time getting her to a coding class she wasn’t that enthusiastic about just because my friend’s sister’s husband told me it was essential if she is ever going to get on in the modern workplace.
Just hanging around
What do you think? Do you feel cars are an essential tool for kids to be able to attend fulfilling activities? Or is it actually better to take a slightly more lazy/laissez-faire approach?
