Do Extracurricular Activities Cause More Burnout In Kids? A Parent’s Real Experience
Last Tuesday, I leaned against my minivan in the piano studio parking lot, peeling a melted cherry popsicle sticker off my wrist, when my 10-year-old Lila rounded the corner from her lesson. Her cleat scuffed a curb, she dropped her half-full water bottle, and instead of picking it up, she just stood there, shoulders hunched, and cried. “I don’t have any energy left for anything,” she said. “Not even the popcorn we were going to make for movie night.” That night, I stared at the printed calendar taped to our fridge—neat little blue blocks for soccer, green for piano, purple for art club—and thought the question that nags at every parent I know: do all these after-school activities leave kids more burned out than if they had nothing at all?
I’d seen the opposite side just a month earlier, when I waited with my neighbor’s 11-year-old son Javi after school while his mom finished a late work shift. Javi doesn’t do any extracurriculars; his parents tried a couple a few years back and he said they felt like extra school, so they let him quit. For 45 minutes, he sat on my porch step scrolling TikTok, pausing only to complain that his day had dragged on forever. By the time his mom pulled up, he said he was too tired to even walk to the corner store with her, even though he’d done nothing more strenuous than tap a screen all afternoon.
That got me thinking, so I called my sister, who’s a middle school counselor, and asked her what she sees day to day. She told me she’s had parents come in convinced their kid’s burnout is from too many activities, and other parents convinced their kid’s burnout is from too much unstructured free time. The truth, she said, isn’t that activities cause more burnout—it’s what kind of activities, how much space you leave around them, and who picked them out.
I started paying closer attention after that. A year and a half ago, Lila was only doing competitive soccer, which I’d pushed her to join because I thought it would teach her teamwork and keep her active. She came home every day complaining she was tired, even on days she didn’t have practice. She’d zone out on the couch for two hours before homework, and half the time she fell asleep before she finished. Then she told me she hated competitive, that she just wanted to play with her friends for fun, not stay after for extra drills every Saturday. I let her switch to a rec league, and added piano and art club on top. I was worried that two activities plus school would be too much, but for a while, she had more energy than she’d had in a year.
The problem only came when we stopped checking in. I got busy with work, stopped asking how she felt about the weekly schedule, and just kept filling the blocks. The parking lot breakdown was the wake up call. What I’ve learned since then is that asking “are you tired” doesn’t work—kids will say they’re tired no matter what, because being a kid is tiring. Instead, I started doing a quick three-question check-in every Sunday night while we fold laundry together. First: Which activity this week did you wish you could skip? Second: After which activity did you feel ready to sit down and do homework, and after which did you feel like you couldn’t think straight? Third: Is there any day after school you want to just stay home and do nothing? It takes five minutes, and it gives me a clearer picture of how she’s really doing than any general question.
I also made one small concrete change to our routine: I added 15 minutes of unplanned buffer time between school pickup and the first activity, and between any back-to-back activities. Before, I’d rush straight from the school parking lot to the soccer field to cut down on wait time, and we’d go straight from soccer to piano without stopping. Now, we find a spot to park, she eats a granola bar, and she can do whatever she wants for 15 minutes—scroll TikTok, draw in her notebook, talk about what her friend did at recess, or just sit quiet. No talking about homework, no reminders about practice etiquette, just nothing. That small change cut down on her end-of-day exhaustion more than cutting an activity did at first.
After the parking lot breakdown, we cut art club—she said it was the one she always wanted to skip, because it’s right after lunch on Wednesdays and she just wants to go home and mess around in our backyard instead. We kept soccer and piano, kept the weekly check-ins and the buffer time, and most weeks now work out fine. Last week, she had school, soccer practice, and piano all in the same day, and after her lesson she asked to stop for ice cream. She talked the whole drive home about the goal she’d scored that afternoon, and the new Disney song she was learning to play. She got home, did her homework without complaining, and stayed up for our entire movie night.
I still have days where I worry we’re doing too much, or too little. Javi just joined a robotics club last month that he begged his parents to let him try, and his mom told me he’s less tired now than he was when he spent every afternoon sitting at home. There’s no one answer to the burnout question. Some kids are happy with one activity a week, some are happy with three. Burnout doesn’t come from the activities themselves—it comes from rushing, from doing things someone else wants you to do, and from not leaving space for the nothing that every kid needs. Right now, what works for us is checking in every week, adjusting as we go, and not assuming that more activities automatically mean more burnout. We still have bad days, and we’ll probably have more parking lot breakdowns down the line. That’s just how it goes.
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