Should My Kid Join More Extracurricular Clubs? What I Learned From Trial and Error
Last October, I was folding sweatpants on the living room couch when my 10th grader, Mia, slung her backpack down by the door and flopped onto the other end. Her neon orange cross country uniform still smelled like grass and citrus body spray, and her half-finished watercolor of our tabby cat peeked out of her art folder. “Hey,” she said, picking at a loose thread on the couch cushion. “Lila asked me to join poetry club with her. Should I? All the girls in my grade are in, like, four clubs already. I only do two.”
A year earlier, I would’ve jumped at the question. Back then, Mia didn’t do any clubs at all. She came home every day, tossed her bag, and spent the afternoon watching TikTok or napping on the couch, and every time I asked if she wanted to try anything, she’d just say all clubs were cringe. I spent hours scrolling parent Facebook groups, reading threads about what colleges look for on applications, and I was convinced I was failing her by letting her sit idle. I badgered her into trying cross country that first semester of high school, even though she swore she hated running. To my surprise, she ended up liking it—loved the team bus rides, the post-practice ice cream runs, even the early Saturday morning meets. A month later, she signed up for art club on her own, no pushing from me. I breathed a sigh of relief, thought we’d checked the extracurricular box, and moved on.
But that October, the poetry club question brought all my old worry bubbling back. I didn’t want to say no and hold her back, but I’d also watched her these past few months, how she thrived when she had unstructured time to draw for fun or hang out with her friends without rushing to the next thing. I told her we could try it for a month, no strings attached, and reevaluate after that.
What followed was exactly what you’d expect. Her schedule filled up fast: cross country practice Monday, Wednesday, Friday after school, art club Tuesday, poetry club Thursday. By the second week, she was waking up grumpy, forgetting to pack her lunch, and I had to remind her three times to finish her history reading. She used to bring her sketchbook to cross country meets to draw between races, and she stopped bringing it entirely. One Thursday, she got home at 6, plopped down at the dinner table to eat the mac and cheese I’d made, and fell asleep face-first into her bowl before she took three bites.
I woke her up, got her changed and into bed, and the next morning we sat down at the kitchen table with a sheet of notebook paper after breakfast. I didn’t give her a speech about overcommitting. I just asked her to list every single thing she does in a typical week, including the stuff no one counts as a commitment: classes, homework, the 30 minutes she spends scrolling TikTok before bed, the hour we spend watching baking shows every Sunday, the 20 minutes she draws for fun after homework, even the 15 minutes she spends picking out her outfit every morning. Then I asked her to put a check next to everything she actually looks forward to, and an X next to everything that feels like a chore.
Poetry club got a half X. She said it was fun hearing people read their work, but it fell right after two hours of running, she was dead tired by the time it started, and she’d only agreed to go because Lila asked, not because she’d ever cared that much about writing poetry. Her 20 minutes of personal drawing got an X too—she’d been too tired to do it for two straight weeks. That was all we needed to see. She dropped the weekly poetry club meetings, but the advisor said she could still come to the monthly open mics on weekends if she wanted, which she does every couple of months when she’s free.
I used to think more clubs meant more opportunities, a better transcript, a more prepared kid. But my sister, who’s a high school counselor, told me years ago that admissions officers don’t care about a long list of clubs you showed up to twice a semester. They care about what you did in the ones you actually cared about. And even if college wasn’t on the table, why would we fill up their whole week with stuff they don’t even enjoy just to check a box?
For other parents stuck on this question, that 10-minute notebook exercise is what I tell people to try. It’s low-effort, no fancy planning required, and it forces both you and your kid to see what actually gets cut when you add something new. If the new club is something your kid is buzzing about, you can look for low-stakes things to cut that don’t matter much—like that hour of mindless scrolling they admit they don’t even enjoy, or that old club they’ve been dragging themselves to for a year and don’t care about anymore. If it’s just something all their friends are doing, and they don’t love it that much, it’s okay to say no.
It’s spring now, and Mia’s busy helping organize art club’s spring show and gearing up for the last cross country meet of the year. She still draws for 20 minutes every night and binges baking shows with me on Sundays. Last week I saw a post from a classmate’s mom bragging about her daughter joining her fifth club this year, and I felt that little old twinge of worry, like maybe we’re doing something wrong. But then Mia came home, showed me the new sketch she did of the cardinal that sits on our fence, and ranted about how the art show’s frame order got messed up and she had to fix it, and I forgot all about that worry. There’s no magic number of clubs that works for every kid. Next year Mia might decide she wants to add something new, and we’ll just pull out the notebook paper and do the exercise again. Right now, this works. We’ll figure out the rest when we get there.
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