Awh yes, the feeling of relief when the school bus pulls away heading off for the start of a new year. You’ve worked hard keeping them occupied over the summer, attempting to ward of the ever so hated state of existence; boredom. Yet now you’re about to come face to face with another exhausting struggle, extracurricular activities. We encourage our children to try out for anything and everything. We do this not realizing how much of our life we end up signing away, because with every activity comes the expected shuttle service.
Now instead of simply allowing our kids to have an innocent outlet, we end up signing our limited free time over to surprise fundraisers, late night practices, far away games, and the “forgot my shoes” bonus trips. Not to mention we still need to help manage homework that can sometimes get held off until 10 o’ clock at night. YIKES!
Most of you know that I am a counselor and I specialize in couples. One of the biggest road blocks in treatment is getting enough time for the couples to reconnect. The leading culprit is usually the responsibilities that comes with their child’s sporting events (or children’s…). Beings I am a mom of young kids I have not had my own experience with this lovely load; nevertheless, I believe we have come up with a great idea to give couples more time to reconnect: car pooling (yes, not a new idea but to my surprise one that is under utilized).
I had this couple one time that had three kids, all in after school activities. They were literally shuttling kids around nonstop every day of the week. It was frustrating for me because they were at a stand still in treatment until they could find some time to reconnect and put their marriage as a priority. One day I threw out an idea of car pooling and received a less than enthusiastic response. But once I got them to buy into the idea, they ended up changing their school year for the better.
Here’s what we did and how it turned out for the couple:
The husband sent out a mass email to the parents of each event/team their child was playing on, which included three mock shuttle service schedules. He asked parents which nights they would prefer to run around and which ones they would like to have off etc. They ended up whittling their running time down from 7 days a week to 2 or 3 depending on the week. They had such an overwhelming response that the district included this idea in their newsletter before winter sports started up.
Just think about it. You are not the only parent that is suffering from being behind the wheel too much. Time is precious and we crave more of it. Why don’t we learn to lean on each other a little more and bring that sense of community back to raising our children.
Happy 2014-2015 School Year!