Help Your Kids Balance School & Sports With These Easy Tips

Be Realistic

There is a balance to all things—sometimes you’re going to have to say “no”. Moderation must define your regular patterns of movement, or you’ll always be playing catch-up. When you let things get out of balance, you have to run all over the place putting them back where they were supposed to be. The more activities you cram into an already busy schedule, the harder it will be to fit everything in. You don’t want to do this by the seat of your pants; you want a plan.

Today’s parents have a propensity to overload children in terms of available activities. The truth is, modern education may not necessarily represent the best possible means to learn for children. Critical thought and individual thinking will always lead to more intelligent individuals. Many educational paradigms today foster a group-minded perspective incidentally through not allowing children enough time to properly process.

Consider the homework your child has and teach them how to focus on homework, consider your work schedule, and consider household duties. Also, consider idle time. It is absolutely necessary that your children are able to have time off. Thankfully, in many households spouses divide up duties. With a multi-child house, though, that can get complicated.


Complicating the issue further is the reality that children get bored with things, they make mistakes, and they regularly encounter little obstacles that must be overcome. They may not want to do anything athletic. But they need to, for the same reason they need to have time alone and process. And it’s also an opportunity for you to help teach them, as they grow, techniques in time management.

Team Advantages

Learning with a team teaches community and loyalty in combination with self-discipline of a critical-thinking variety—that’s where learning time management skills makes a cameo in the process. The child who grows into an adult athlete must find creative ways to exercise and enhance his ability to play, and that requires taught scheduling.

So the solution for the parent hoping to impart these skills to their children seems to be putting together a time-table which includes the elements previously considered: the parent’s schedule, the child’s, availability of time between the two, and some level of time off. It’s not unreasonable to expect a daily three-hour window for your child’s activities.

Once you have these things figured out, you’re going to want to work on maintaining the morale of your child in the athletic event in which they’re involved. If they’re on a team, to an extent your family additionally becomes part of the group. It’s not unexpected for one family to take a group of kids to a tournament out of town, and another family to take the same group the following weekend.

You may want to pitch in for the team yourself. If you can manage this, it will be not just an exercise in teamwork, but one in family cohesion as well. Additionally, you become involved in the community—so you’ll naturally be compelled to do things for it.

Food For Thought

For special events, incentives, and celebrations, you can get a lot of “mileage”, if you will, out of candy. One reason children like candy pertains to its novelty. Athletic children maintain enough regular activity that their metabolisms are likely to process candy more healthily than adult metabolisms—though there are always statistical outliers.

One solution for the school team might be the installation of a vending machine where practices and games take place—you might even put several in. You can buy wholesale vending machine candy and save; and SweetServices.com provides: “All the candy you need to fill all of your vending machines.”

There are many different ways you can go about helping your child balance athleticism and education. Because education may be less desirable than sports for some, you may have to get involved with it. The same is true with sports—and both have an equal but different level of importance in the upbringing of most children. For both situations, getting involved personally makes a lot of sense.

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