What Individual Parents Can Do: Extracurricular Activities
Are all those piano and taekwondo lessons a good idea?
Extracurricular activities!
In this edition of “What Individual Parents Can Do” we’ll talk about extracurricular activities: the piano lessons, hockey teams, and science camps that families can explore outside of free public school.
We’ve seen that tutoring and a healthy diet have big long-term benefits. Are extracurricular activities similar?
Many of us hope not, because doing this stuff is hard. Should kids join the local private soccer club that costs $4,000 per year and asks parents to coordinate 4 separate drop-offs and pick-ups every week? Should kids do a summer space camp that costs thousands of dollars and only takes care of one of 9 out-of-school weeks? Or should kids… relax and hang out with friends? We all want to know!
Well, we kind of want to know. Maybe we just want to be reassured it’s not a big deal either way. And a LOT of parenting gurus are happy to tell us that.
Extracurricular activities do matter
As I look at evidence, I start with a guess that these activities probably can benefit kids. Parents, tutors, teachers, guidance counselors, and peers all matter quite a lot – it would be surprising if good piano teachers and soccer coaches didn’t. To change that belief, I’d have to see strong evidence showing these activities do not matter. And if you look at the best studies, that’s not what we find.
Consider the Montreal Longitudinal and Experimental Study, which sought to help elementary school kids improve social skills and self-control.
The program selected kids who, according to their teachers, were struggling with these skills, and placed them in small groups with other kids excelling in these areas and a professional group facilitator. The program involved 19 45-minute sessions spanning two years. It’s not a typical extracurricular activity – it also included a parent training component – but it’s easy to see parallels with a lot of activities we all consider.
What did the kids learn?
Sessions included topics such as how to invite a bystander to play, how to ask “why,” how to give a compliment, and how to help… how to react to teasing, how to react when angry, and what to do if other children refuse to play with you. For each situation, the children reviewed ways to define the problem, identified the intentions of the other person…, analyzed their feelings if they were in the role of the victim, suggested different action plans to solve the problem, anticipated their consequences, selected one action plan and, finally, gave positive reinforcement to themselves for their work. — Algan et al 2022
Wow, nice work kids! Here’s one example:
…[I]n one session on self-control, the facilitator … talked about situations where children would be upset and might make an angry outburst, like a spilled glass of milk…. The facilitator then modeled a situation: he has been playing tag, and he just got tagged and is now out. He’s upset because he is the first person to be tagged out, and he’s angry and disappointed. The facilitator demonstrates how children can respond in this situation: noticing clues in his body that he is going to lose control (clenching fists, feeling hot), he thinks about what happened to make him feel this way (he got tagged first, is worried other kids will laugh at him), he chooses a way to avoid making an angry outburst (count to ten, move away, say to himself “calm down,” breathe), and then he acts and praises himself. The facilitator then invites children to perform additional role-plays based at school (one child bumps another’s desk and their pen falls), at home (someone suddenly turns off the TV because it’s time for dinner) or while playing (a friend takes a ball that was dropped). Together, the group makes observations about what the actors are doing, how they are following the steps, and gives feedback. At the end of the session, the facilitator fills out a workbook with the children to explain how they can practice self-control until the next session (“homework”). — Algan et al 2022
This program reminds me of playing sports with great coaches who prioritize child development and team social dynamics over pure winning.
A team of economists recently measured the long-term impacts of this program. For the kids who were struggling with early social skills, the experience increased future income by 20%. Twenty percent.
In other words, these 19 sessions over two years increased the participating kids’ future household income in their 20s and 30s by $12,000 (from $61000 to $73000) per year. Over a full career that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for each kid. This one little program.
As always, income is not the main goal. But it’s a good barometer for overall quality of life – things like freedom, health, fulfillment, eudaimonia that for most parents really are the goal.
Another remarkable study in Toronto led by psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg randomly assigned 6-year-olds to participate in a year of weekly small-group extracurricular music classes (piano or voice), drama classes, or no lessons at all. These were deluxe activities. The music lessons took place with full-time professional instructors at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, which looks like this:
Music lessons increased these kids’ IQ by 2 points. Is that big? On the scale of educational impacts on test scores, it’s moderate — about as big as the impacts of having a moderately better K12 teacher for one year. IQ by itself probably doesn’t affect future life outcomes all that much. I’d predict (based on Zax and Rees 2002) these impacts to raise expected future income by around 1% or tens of thousands of dollars. That’s enough for kids to reimburse their parents for the cost of these group lessons, if they’re so inclined. But that misses the point. These were not classes in logic or test taking or math. Music lessons obviously have a lot of potential benefits unrelated to IQ points. Kids might learn to, you know, enjoy music. They also might learn to work hard, persevere, and they might build friendships that center on creative expression. The IQ gains feel like a windfall that confirm weird positive changes inside these kids’ brains.
This study turned up something else unexpected: the kids who got placed into drama classes, instead of music classes or no classes, wound up scoring a lot higher on measures of social skills. Social skills have large and growing long-term economic benefits. This suggests that parents can, in theory, choose what kinds of skills their children will build by guiding their choice of extracurricular activities. Another paper by three economists titled “Mozart or Pelé?” reaches the same conclusion, albeit with less compelling methods.
We can go on. In Germany a professionally-taught preschool science program called “Junior University” raised kids’ test scores by quite a lot with just four 90-minute sessions on topics such as “experiments with sparkling gas” and “the small beginnings of big cinema.”
In Turin, Italy a 3-day high school math camp for gifted kids – which looks ridiculously fun – raised scores on a math test, and perhaps more importantly improved kids’ sense of confidence and extroversion.
All these studies involve short programs — a few days or at most 1-2 years. What does an entire childhood of accumulated exposure to these activities do? Maybe we should multiply the impacts from these studies by 2 or 3. Maybe we multiply them by 10.
It’s not all that relaxing to hear this, but evidence cannot reject the idea that parents have significant power to shape their kids’ skills, identities, and future prospects through high-quality extracurricular activities. Please be aware the studies I’ve highlighted focus on established, reputable programs overseen by experienced professionals, not random after-school programs improvised by volunteer teenagers. High-quality activities tend to be expensive and time-consuming for parents. But they’re not some dumb bourgeois indulgence – they’re productive and they’re probably part of the reason why richer kids enter adulthood so much more likely to succeed.
Lack of access is a bigger problem than “overscheduling”
If you read the classic book Unequal Childhoods by sociologist Annette Laureau, one of the differences that jumps out between the lives of rich kids and poor kids is the gap in extracurricular activities. Here are three kids she studies from three different class backgrounds:
There are two ways to respond to these gaps. One is to conclude more affluent kids today tend to be “overscheduled” and should actually do fewer activities. While this surely can happen, there is no evidence establishing it’s a common problem among kids today. (This paper by three economists looked promising and has gotten a lot of attention, but in my view it does not seem persuasive, and it includes homework alongside all other extracurricular activities which is not how most people think about this.) For now, research cannot give us much insight into this question and you should feel good about relying on your own gut instincts. Is your kid exhausted and stressed out about all their activities? Consider scaling down. Is your kid spending a lot of recreational time on things such as TV or social media that don’t seem very fulfilling? Consider scaling up.
The other reaction to these rich-poor activity gaps is to conclude that a lot of working class and lower-income kids would benefit from a bigger dose of extracurricular activities. Given the standard pattern of positive impacts I highlight above, this is where I land.
On hidden talent
Emily Oster writes “if your child is truly a generational talent, a second Misty Copeland or Simone Biles, you’ll probably find out even if you do nothing.”
I agree with Oster it’s a little nuts to enroll your kid in things hoping they turn out to be a “generational talent.” But it’s misleading to suggest that extreme talent — and the more moderate talent that most of us have to rely on — will somehow blossom on its own, and parents can therefore relax about all this hard extracurricular stuff. Anecdotally, my sense is that extreme achievement often involves extreme parental involvement.
Take Venus and Serena Williams. They did not stumble onto a tennis court and get “discovered.” They were shepherded onto tennis courts day after day, year after year, by parents maniacally devoted to tennis excellence. If you watch the film King Richard, it’s kind of funny to imagine how the Williams sisters’ parents might react to a claim that great talent will emerge “even if you do nothing.”
Similar stories emerge for Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, David Beckham, and many other stars — their parents basically did the opposite of “nothing.” (I mentioned this is anecdotal. It would be useful to put data together from life stories of superstars and measure their exposure to extreme parental involvement compared to the general population.)
I’d guess that access to exorbitantly high-quality extracurricular activities is probably a key reason why kids of richer parents are so much more likely to achieve extreme athletic and academic success.
So don’t drive yourself crazy scheduling jiu-jitsu, violin, painting, swimming, basketball, space camp, math olympiad, choir, and origami. Go for quality (experienced professional teachers, smaller groups, lots of engagement and motivation) over quantity and use your gut instincts to avoid overdoing it. If kids are struggling in any major social or emotional areas, in particular, search for activities that can help them enjoy building up those skills.
But also don’t take those relaxing “anything is ok” bromides of elite parenting gurus all that seriously either. Whatever they preach to the masses, I’ll bet by some odd coincidence their own kids wind up enrolled in some great extracurricular activities.
And of course, this entire strategy will be out of reach for many parents until we decide to invest publicly in expanding access to high-quality activities, and stop holding future generations hostage to the limitations of their own individual parents’ time and money.
Did any of these studies follow these impacts into adulthood?
Because Gregory Clark's work suggests that no, it probably doesn't matter all that much.
https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/
You should enroll your kids in stuff for its own sake, to give them pleasure, not because you think their IQ will permanently increase a few points in a way that will give them an edge over other kids (a gross way to approach society, or to view children who are not yours: as competitors to be sped by on the road of life)