Why My 8-Year-Old Said “Remind Me to Never Do Clubs” — What I Learned About Over-Scheduling Kids
It was 5:17 on a rain-soaked Tuesday in the elementary school parking lot when Leo wrenched the car door open, dumped his dripping backpack on the floor mat, and said, flat as the half-eaten granola bar crumpled in his jacket pocket, “Remind me to never do clubs. Ever.”
I turned down the radio, where I’d been half-listening to a work call on my way to pick him up, and stared. He’d just gotten out of art club, the first activity I’d signed him up for at third grade back-to-school night. I’d checked three boxes that night, actually: art on Tuesdays, math games on Wednesdays, running club on Thursdays. All one hour, all low-stakes, no weekend games or mandatory fundraisers. I’d even joked to a friend that I was basically the anti-helicopter parent, since most of his classmates had piano, competitive soccer, and tutoring on top of the school’s club lineup. It filled the gap between 3:30 dismissal and when I could wrap up my part-time work shifts, and I figured he got to do things he didn’t have time for during the regular school day. Win-win, I thought.
I prodded, gentle, as I pulled out of the parking lot. “I thought you were excited to finish that dinosaur diorama you were talking about last week?” He shrugged, staring out the window at the raindrops racing down the glass, and dug the lumpy clay pencil holder he’d made that day out of his backpack. One handle had already snapped off in transit. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s just… I already sat at a desk for seven hours. Then I have to go sit at another desk and do what someone tells me to do for another hour. I never get to just go home.”
I’d seen the warning signs for a month, if I’d slowed down enough to notice. Mornings had turned into slow, dragging battles: he’d sit on the floor by the door for ten minutes tying the same shoe, ask every third day if we could just skip school and stay home to make cinnamon toast and watch old Pokémon episodes. I’d written it off as standard back-to-school adjustment, the same way I’d written off the way he’d snap at his little sister over a single Lego brick after dinner. I’d nudge him out the door with a reminder that we’d paid the $25 supply fee for art club, that his friend Milo was in math games, that running club would let him get his wiggles out. I thought I was doing the right thing.
That night I emailed his teacher, just to ask if she’d noticed anything off, if he was struggling with schoolwork or friends. Her reply was sitting in my inbox when I got out of the shower, short and blunt, the kind of note only a teacher who’s seen 20 batches of third graders can write: “This happens every October. Half the kids in three or more clubs are checked out by fall break. You wouldn’t go straight from an 8-hour workday to a scheduled, supervised activity three days a week with no downtime, would you? Why do we expect 8-year-olds to do it?”
After dinner, I dumped all three club flyers on the kitchen table next to his leftover chicken nuggets, and said the line I’d never thought I’d say: “We don’t have to finish any of these. The supply fees are paid, that’s not your problem to worry about. You pick what you want to keep, if anything.”
He didn’t even take a minute to think. Math games went straight to the discard pile, running club right after. He wanted to keep art club, he said, but half the time the projects are dumb—fall leaf wreaths, handprint turkeys, stuff he doesn’t want to make—when all he wants to do is work on the space raccoon comic book he draws in his free time. I emailed the art club lead that night, explained, asked if it was okay if he brought his sketchbook and worked on his own stuff when the day’s project didn’t interest him. She wrote back 10 minutes later: “Please. Half the kids in there are only here because their parents signed them up. He can draw whatever he wants.”
The first week after we dropped the two clubs, I picked him up at 3:30 two days that week, no stop, no scheduled activity. The first Tuesday, he walked in the door, dropped his backpack by the coat rack, and didn’t even stop to greet the dog before he flopped down on the living room rug and started digging through his Lego bin. I checked my work email twice, paced a little, waited for him to say he was bored, that he wanted to do something. He didn’t. For 40 minutes he stacked bricks and mumbled to himself, making up a plot where the space raccoon steals all the erasers from the school office. No one told him what to build, no one gave him a grade, no one set a timer.
I still work two days a week where I can’t leave the office until 5:30, so we didn’t eliminate supervised after-school time entirely. Instead of structured clubs, we switched him to the school’s free open rec program, where the only rule is be kind. He can sit on the bleachers and read his comic books if he wants, join a pickup basketball game if he feels like it, or draw at the picnic table with a friend. No one takes attendance for activities, no one makes him participate. It still covers the childcare gap, but it doesn’t eat into the downtime he needs.
I bought the common line for a long time, that unstructured time is wasted time, that every hour after school should be building a skill or teaching responsibility or making a memory. But what I’ve watched over the past two months is that the downtime is where the actual, useful skill-building happens, the stuff that sticks. On afternoons he comes straight home, he does his 15 minutes of math homework without arguing, he doesn’t drag his feet at bedtime, he works through silly friend fights on his own while he colors instead of melting down about them at 8 PM. A few weeks ago he came home upset that his best friend kept ditching him at recess to play four square, and by the time he’d finished coloring two pages of his comic, he told me he’d figured it out: he’d just tell his friend he wanted to draw on the bench two days a week, and they could play four square the other three. No club taught him that problem-solving. He needed empty space to think it through.
I know the common pushback: kids need to learn to follow through on commitments, that letting them quit whenever they want teaches them to give up when things get hard. I get that. But there’s a big difference between sticking with a hockey team you begged to join even when drills are tiring, and forcing a kid to finish a 10-week club you signed them up for just because you don’t want to waste $25. Leo will spend three straight weeks erasing holes in his sketchbook paper trying to get a drawing of his space raccoon right. He knows how to stick with something hard when it matters to him. He doesn’t need to practice persistence on a mandatory math game he never asked to play.
Sign-up sheets for spring clubs went home in his backpack last week. He pulled them out at dinner, studied them for a few minutes, and asked if robotics club would be okay, as long as it only meets one day a week and he still gets two afternoons with no plans. I told him we can map it out together, but we don’t have to sign up for anything just because spots fill fast, or because all his friends are going.
The lumpy clay pencil holder with the re-glued handle sits on his desk now, next to his stack of comic notebooks and his pencil case. Some Tuesdays, when he walks out to the car after art club, he’ll roll his eyes and repeat that line about never doing clubs—usually when they made him do a seasonal craft instead of letting him draw. But now he laughs when he says it, because he knows he doesn’t have to stay in anything that drains him just to check a box.
I still catch myself sometimes, scrolling summer camp listings and pausing on coding camps and nature camps, thinking how good they’d look, how much he’d probably learn. Then I remember that rainy Tuesday parking lot, how heavy his backpack looked, how flat his voice was. We’re not anti-club forever, I guess. We’re just anti-clubs by default. That’s enough for now.
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