The Cost of "Extra-Curriculars" on your Marriage

There is a new trap that we face in the 21st century.  Did you realize that signing little Johnny up for soccer has a cost for your marriage?  

We live in a society that pushes all of our families to have our kids involved in all kinds of activities.  They must play sports and participate in debate clubs.  We all believe that if they don’t they will grow up to be slackers and will be left in the dust by the kids that have all those things on their “resume.” (do you realize that’s what high schoolers now call their high school transcripts?  “Resume” used to be a term used for adults entering the job field!)

I have discovered that those things are squeezing the life out of our marriages.  There is only so much time, money and energy to spend in our family budget.  If we make these commitments the family flex time is spent on soccer instead of Mom and Dad being able to sleep in on a Saturday or come home after work to have any leisure time together versus running over to watch a volleyball tournament until 9 pm and then falling into bed.

If you are committing to debate for your child there is only so much flex money in the budget.  It gets spent on the tournament fees and there is nothing left for Mom and Dad to go out to dinner or coffee...

If you commit to the swim team we have a limited energy budget in our lives... if there are only a few energy slots available by the time you fill them with the kids soccer, debate and band there are no slots left for anything Mom or Dad might want or even desperately need.  Any needs that they may have get put on the back burner and they get more and more exhausted, depleted and estranged from each other in their frenzy of getting to all of those events. 

So, be careful!  Prayerfully and selectively choose the activities that your kids participate in realizing that we are living in a deluded society that doesn’t take into account all of these costs.  Satan is trying to distract and destroy marriages and families and this is yet another subtle way He is doing it.  

Take back some of your flex time for the health of you individually as Mom and Dad, your marriages and the quality of your family life.  It’s scary at first but then you see the quality that is born by doing less and the scales fall from your eyes and you can’t imagine exchanging your life for that hollow, exhausting life again for your sake and your children’s.

See what happens in your marriage when you’re not flat out running and exhausted all the time.  Think of a life where you’re no longer dividing and conquering constantly, where you have down time on the weekends, you have meals together more often, you have the option of doing spur of the moment activities together, where you actually as Mom and Dad have time to rest, to read a book that has been sitting and calling to you for years, to rest!  Imagine how much less irritable you will be when you aren’t stretched to the limit day after day and there is time built into your schedule for you to be refueled?!  Imagine the nurturing your husband will feel when you put his needs for rest above the kids needs for “extra-curricular opportunities.”  

Are you getting a picture of the life that is possible and what we are missing out on by living this 21st century delusion?  Live differently than the culture we live in today.  Put the priorities back in the proper order with kids needs coming after the health of the family, which depends on the health of Mom and Dad and the marriage.  Get ready for a monumental change in your quality of life!