Extracurricular activities for your teen to try

What are extracurricular activities?

Sport, drama, Scouts and Guides, hobbies like craft or photography – extracurricular activities can be just about anything your child enjoys outside school. They can also be things you’ve encouraged your child to do, like language classes, music, debating, religious instruction, swimming, or paid and unpaid jobs.

Benefits of extracurricular activities

Taking part in extracurricular activities can:

give your child a chance to try a range of activities and find things they’re good at
give your child a sense of achievement and boost their self-esteem, confidence and resilience
be good for your child’s mental health and sense of belonging
help your child build friendships with people with similar interests
get your child involved in positive activities like sport or community activity
help your child feel motivated in general
help your child learn to handle responsibility, take initiative and solve problems.

Examples of extracurricular activities to help your child grow and develop

The following articles have information about extracurricular activities that your child could try:

How to encourage your child to join extracurricular activities

Not all young people are into extracurricular activities. That’s fine.

Some are keen but just need a bit of help to get started with extracurricular activities. If this sounds like your child, you can talk with them to work out what they’re interested in. You could find out what other young people do by talking to other families, looking in the local paper or searching online. You could also help your child find out about their school’s clubs and societies.

Your child might need help to ease into a new group of people. After all, it can be hard to turn up to something new, especially if you don’t know anyone. Perhaps your child has a friend who’d like to do the activity with them. Or you could arrange for your child to meet someone who already does the activity.

Your child could also start an activity gradually. For example, if your child’s ultimate goal is to be on the stage with a local theatre group, they could start by working as a stage hand.

It’s OK if your child doesn’t do many, or any, extracurricular activities. Your child might feel that they get to try and enjoy plenty of things at school. Extracurricular activities are voluntary. If your child doesn’t want to do an activity, it’s best not to force them to do it. They’re unlikely to enjoy it and they won’t benefit from it.

Is your child doing too many extracurricular activities?

Balancing work and fun is a challenge for everyone – it’s a life skill that’s important for your child to learn.

If you’re worried that your child is doing too many extracurricular activities, you could watch for signs that things are out of balance. These might include your child being tired, grumpy or stressed or having trouble sleeping.

You and your child might be able to cope with this in short bursts, like around exams, at grand final time, or before a big performance. But if your child is showing these signs at other times, it might be worth looking at how much they’re doing.

How to work out whether your child has too many extracurricular activities

Start by asking your child whether they feel they have the balance right. Then look at these things:

Time away from home – how many nights does your child come home after 8.30 or 9 pm? How long are they out for on weekends? Can your child contribute to life at home, like doing their chores?
Balance of activities – how much sleep is your child getting? Do they have any down time? Can they get their homework done on time? Does your child have time for friends? Are they spending a lot of time in singing lessons and tennis practice, for example, at the expense of schoolwork or socialising?
Behaviour – does your child seem happy? Are they irritable? Do they seem stressed a lot of the time?
Effect on the family – how many family meals are missed, or disrupted, by your child’s activities? Is this a problem for your family? How often does your child miss family activities? Do your child’s activities mean other family members miss out on doing things?
Interests and age – different children can balance different amounts of extracurricular activity. This tends to change with age too. What your child can handle when they’re 9 will be different from what they can manage at 14.

It can be hard to let your child stop doing an activity that they've been doing for a long time. But giving your child some responsibility to choose activities lets them know that you trust them to manage their own time and make the right decisions for themselves.

What to do if your child has too many extracurricular activities

Talk with your child if you’re concerned that they need a better balance between extracurricular activities and other areas of their life. You could try the steps for time management suggested below.

1. Introduce your concerns

If you tell your child that you’ve noticed they don’t seem happy, seem tired, or seem too busy to do all the things they need to do, it can give them the chance to think about how they’re spending their time and energy.

For example, you might say, ‘You seem so busy. I wonder whether you’re doing too much’ or ‘We need to think about how late the sessions are finishing, because you’re not getting to bed until 10.30 pm 3 nights a week’.

2. Work out how your child’s time is spent

You or your child could create a weekly chart, with details for each day’s activities and how long they take. You could look at the chart with your child and ask your child what they think about it.

It’s OK to let your child know how things look to you. For example, ‘You must be struggling to find time for homework each night with this schedule’ or ‘There isn’t much time in your week for just hanging out with family and friends’.

Then you could say, ‘I wonder whether we need to think about this and come up with a better plan’.

3. Work out priorities

You might suggest that your child thinks about these questions:

What would I like to do more or less of?
What things are most important to me?
What’s important to us as a family?
What do I have to do, like schoolwork?

This gives your child the chance to solve the problem themselves, rather than having you solve it for them.

Once your child has thought about the questions above, you could talk together about their ideas for change. You can give feedback on the things you agree with or any problems you see.

4. Assess the plan

Your child is learning skills for managing time and setting priorities. If you let your child put their plan into action, it gives them the chance to practise these skills.

You and your child might need to tweak the new schedule. That’s OK. It’s good for your child to learn about the importance of trying different options to work out what’s best.

What about activities that your child wants to stop but you don’t? Explaining why you want your child to do an activity might help. For example, ‘I’d like you to be able to speak Spanish so you can talk to your grandmother on the phone’. Or you could negotiate with your child to stick with an activity for another term or 6 weeks, to see whether things improve.