After-school clubs in Worthing: Trying to be the perfect parent by filling up on extra-curricular activities

I don’t want to do my parents a disservice, who were really good parents when I was younger, by the way (and who are still awesome) – but modern parenting seems to require you to do more than when I was a child.

What I’m talking about specifically this week are extracurricular activities. There’s no official moms and dads rulebook that I know of (unless they forgot to give me my parental code when I left the hospital?), but it’s common knowledge. among parents on the playground that it is not enough to manage the balance between work and care children come and go from nursery and school while adapting to running a home , helping kids with homework, taking them to parties, arranging weekend outings and organizing other things like GP appointments and shopping trips that help life to operate on a day-to-day basis.

Because in addition to this already dizzying array of tasks, you are expected to take your children to after-school clubs and groups, to ensure they grow into a complete person with essential life skills such as tap dancing, playing the cello and tending to a herbaceous border (some artistic licenses may have been applied here, no offense intended for the dancing, musical gardeners everywhere).

Admitting that you have a free afternoon after school pick-up is a little taboo. As you walk around your house putting YouTube videos of people making slime on TV (I mean your kid learning more about polygons, of course) you can almost imagine people wondering what kind of parent would leave a few hours off just to relax when their young protege might be captaining a school sports team or learning Mandarin.

We have always made at least one club, but in order not to be outdone or left behind, suddenly we are at four. The most recent addition is swimming. It was a sporadic extracurricular activity for years, with periods of ebb and flow as my tolerance for sitting apart and sweating profusely in the humidity was gradually reached on several occasions.

I plan to keep the distance this time, because I’m afraid that your child’s ability to swim is directly related to the approval score of your playground, and I don’t want to find my invitations to post cafes and dry play dates because I’m the lazy non-swimmer mom.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, because making sure you’re prepared is of paramount importance. Don’t show up without glasses like I did the first week as you’ll be hit with a £13.95 charge for a pair (are they gold plated?!). And wearing tights is not recommended as you have to take your shoes off as a spectator as I found out the hard way. Then there are the hearty snacks and entertainment I have to provide for my youngest, to distract him from the fact that his naughty mommy isn’t taking him to the pool either. Basically you have to pack everything, kitchen sink included in case the showers are busy.

And don’t get me started drying your child off and putting them back in their clothes in a warmer locker room than Dubai in the summer, which certainly doesn’t have room to swing a cat. But I do. And all is well, my child will soon be an independent swimmer. Just in time for me to start picking up child number two…

I was still out on the weekend. This time at the Escape Bar (formerly Tangerine for seniors) for a school friend’s birthday. It was so much fun dancing to club classics when I was younger. But unlike the good old days, 2022 woke me up the next day with really sore hips. Nothing like discomfort to bring you back to the present day and remind you that you are 40 years old!