From the age of 4, many activities are offered by cultural and sports associations, outside of school time. Judo, boxing, dance, fencing … Faced with this multitude of choices, which activity to turn to for the development of your child?

There is a plethora of extra-curricular activities available for children on Wednesdays, weekends and after school. Between kindergarten and primary, children are curious about everything, their desire to discover and try activities that come out of the school proposals is very strong.

They are lively and often want to try a lot of things. Be careful, however, to leave them free time to dream and be bored. These times of freedom are essential for their proper development. One or two extra-curricular activities are sufficient.

Discover the desires of each child

Each child is unique and develops his tastes according to his personality. You must therefore select the activity according to your desires.

In kindergarten, the little ones will be able to participate in:

• psychomotricity workshops, to test their body and their movement;
• discovery of dance;
• musical awakening;
• swimming baby in swimming pool.

These are initiations, which allow you to discover your body with the reassuring presence of parents. There is no structured learning, everything happens through play.

At this age, the child learns socialization and it is good for him to meet other children with different characters, to play together. Under the reassuring eye of the parent.

From the first grade, the children have acquired enough autonomy and self-confidence to separate from their parent with confidence and to create new circles of friends, to confront other characters.

The child needs to try different things. We therefore do not hesitate to make him try several different and varied activities ranging from sport to music, including drawing, crafts, sewing, horse …

During this period, the children are looking for the collective, but also for creation.

Knowing how to organize and find time

Of course, parents have to come together. And pay attention to the schedules. An activity may seem perfect on paper, but when it asks for a hurry after a meal or a 30-minute drive, the stress can quickly mount every week and the activity loses its purpose of being a moment of relaxation and discovery. transform into a dreaded and stressful time for the whole family.

If we are used to traveling every weekend, no need to choose basketball or football, which will require an investment of presence at the matches every Saturday.

Ditto for activities at 9am. If your child needs a lot of sleep, it will be better to focus on a sleep-in Saturday, where they take the time to wake up, rather than running at dawn. We must not forget that children live a full week of school and that they also have the right to have time off.

Before registering, it is interesting to learn about:

• The day, the hours, does this take place during school holidays;
• The matches and the compulsory presence or not;
• Supervision and security;
• The number of children present;
• The place and the dedicated, adapted equipment.

Activities after 18 p.m. should be avoided on weekdays. At the end of the afternoon, the children no longer have the same attention and need to have their snacks, to rest or to play freely and to do their school homework.

The child was able to try a multitude of activities and he made his choice. He can then start to compete in order to improve his technique. But beware, competition must be experienced as a desire to challenge yourself, to improve your abilities.

He thus learns to:

• to win for oneself and not to crush others;
• learn to lose and win;
• strengthen their self-confidence;
• give the best of himself and see in this achievement a personal victory;
• have fun of the game.

In this spirit, parents are there to support, but in no case to push or to live through their child desires or overcome failures that belong to them. The child is not there to maintain his ego through the success of a sport or by becoming a piano prodigy.

In middle and high school, if the child already practices a team sport, child psychologists recommend that the second activity be rather individual to balance learning.

One session is not enough for the child to form an opinion. The little ones live in the present and do not have the awareness of the inscription in time, nor of the money that this costs. They are simply connected to their desire of the moment. He can just as easily go from the need to “patrol” while making pastry, or gardening, then to that of confronting himself physically by experimenting with judo or rugby. The fear of animals can also evolved into a passion for the horse with riding.

What to do to avoid and anticipate this? 

The ideal is to test the proposed activity over three sessions. Many associations offer this trial period.

If the activity no longer attracts him, we must try to understand if it is what he has to do there that he does not like, or if it is with the other children that he does not find his account and it can also be the facilitator who scares him or who does not suit him.

Better not to insist on pain of disgusting it for life. How many adults say “my mother wanted me to dance, whereas I wanted to do…”.  The main thing is to have fun.