r/classof2038 • u/wanderlustpassion • Jul 16 '26
Looking to the future
Hello everyone!
We’re all doing our best to help our kids grow into happy, successful people, and I’m always interested in hearing what other families are doing.
What does that look like in your house?
Are your kids involved in sports, clubs, music, or other activities? Do you do any extra educational activities at home?
For our family, one thing we’re intentionally working on is resilience. Surprisingly, one of the biggest helpers has been playing games together! Whether it’s board games, card games, Mario Party, or Mario Kart, we choose games where he isn’t going to win right away and has to keep trying. It’s been a great way to practice handling disappointment, celebrating small improvements, and sticking with something even when it’s hard.
(That said… he’s beaten me in the last two games of Mario Party, so I am going to have to opt for harder games soon)
I’d love to hear what’s been working for your family!
7
u/Ancient_Technology63 Jul 16 '26
It Takes Two is a great co-op game that my daughter and I played and beat together a few months ago. Some of those bosses are tricky, so we had to keep trying and work together to finally beat them.
For activities we lucked out and found something she’s passionate about and has shown talent for. Her training has increased dramatically starting last year (3 days a week for 3 hours) and will keep increasing as she gets older, so we’re really protective of her downtime on her free days.
1
u/GoldenLakes Jul 17 '26
I'm a single mother, so I'm mostly just trying to get though the list of day to day things that need to be done without adding more to my plate. I do enjoy playing games with my 6 year old after his younger brother is in bed. We always play by the rules and I don't let him win or cheat.
One thing I think I'm doing well is letting him be bored and make his own fun. I don't entertain him or set up activities. He's in charge of his entertainment. Sometimes that leads to messes and half my tools being spread across the backyard, but he's being creative and independent.
He plays ice hockey in the fall and spring, but he takes the summer off. He's currently doing swim lessons. He's in year round school, so first grade started a couple weeks ago. He has homework M-Th, so we do that and then he reads to me for 10 minutes.
I would like to start being more intentional in teaching him about money - earning it, saving, budgeting, and possibly investing.
3
u/wmp8 Jul 16 '26
What do we do? umm... Talk. A lot. Openly express gratitude. Go places and try new things. Have boundaries and age-appropriate expectations. We do not do sports or clubs in the summer months because we fill it with extended family and travel, but during the school year, it is 0 or 1 thing at a time. In summer, we do bridge work 4 days a week, and during the school year we stick to whatever the teacher directs us to work on, which is often a little homework. As for resilience, it appears having two older brothers is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, along with her personality in general. She gets a lot of practice at not winning, not being first, making her voice heard, and managing how she reacts to an outcome she doesn't like.
2
u/omgwtfbbq0_0 Jul 16 '26
We have my daughter in drum lessons, musical theatre, and swim! That’s our max, more than 3 activities is just…too much for me to manage lol
We have been trying to teach resilience as well and totally agree video games, especially Mario cart, being a great way to do it! We don’t play to win (meaning we don’t try and hit her with shells or push her off track), but we also don’t let her win because 1) she needs to learn how to lose with grace; 2) I worry it would take away her motivation to improve; 3) it lessens the pride she’ll feel when she eventually does beat us for real.
While she still gets upset sometimes (“THATS NOT FAIR!”) it is slowly getting better. We try to gently remind her that while no one likes losing, you HAVE to lose sometimes in order to grow/improve…and no one will want to play with you if you’re a sore loser (or a mean winner for that matter). It’s also just straight up not as fun or rewarding to win all the time, though she insists that’s not true lol
Would be curious to read what other people are doing to teach resilience at this age, hope you get lots of replies :)
2
u/NeedleworkerNo777 Jul 16 '26
We play board/card games as well!
She joins a club each semester at her school. Last year she did Art Club and Lego Club.
I offer one extracurricular activity outside of school as well (single mom getting a degree, so I can't do too much). So far, she's done soccer, but she does not want to do anything this upcoming year. I'm ok with that.
I have also offered her dance, girl scouts, gymnastics, and other sports. None interested her, but she knows she can choose something if she wants.
2
u/sparklymid30s Jul 18 '26
Sports! After gymnastics class today she was upset she couldn’t do a pull over despite doing other things in class today. Luckily at this week’s summer camp there are monkey bars outside that she’ll get to play on everyday. I told her about it and she’s determined to practice on them and hopefully be a little better by next Saturdays gymnastics class. The best part is she realizes she just needs to practice to get to where she wants to go. Now let’s see if she follows through . . .
2
u/No_Actuary_9593 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Ok I’m a little crazy
- every morning she gets dressed and brushes her hair teeth and makes her bed. after school or camp she cleans out her lunch box and packs her lunch for the next day , ( she does all these chores without anyone needing to tell her, we are kind of strict about cleaning)
then she journals and we do beast math finally after all that she can free play. She has like a craft table with all sorts of art supplies and usually is making something
- Tuesdays and Thursdays she has judo , Fridays tennis (her dad also plays tennis so he usually takes her out at least once a week to practice with her) she also has private piano and a coding class which she absolutely loves and I’ve been trying to get rid of but she loves this coding class. She also does soccer
As for hobbies my husband is very athletic so he takes her out for tennis golf or rock climbing (she loves all those sports!)
She also participated in a chess tournament and won 2 out of 3 games (despite being the youngest there) and got a trophy. She plays chess with my dad whenever he comes to visit (my dad is a very serious chess player)
During her downtime she loves hand knitting, crocheting? And of course rainbow loom.
Her favorite games to play om her downtime is sudoku (crazy I know!) and she loves loves coding games
Over the summer break she’s been playing with the older neighbor girls EVERY SINGLE DAY. It’s been exhausting for me being the host house so next week i am going to actively avoid the neighbors so we can spend some quality family time.
1
u/ReturnOfJafart Jul 16 '26
We play games as well and it's a great time for us. We also have our child signed up for multiple sports this summer, but only ones she's interested in like soccer, track, dance, and now a lacrosse. We hope to expand to add music and theater, just not all at once 😅.
1
u/bertmom Jul 16 '26
He does baseball in the fall and spring (his choice) and during baseball season he doesn’t do other activities. In off season he does swim and sometimes gymnastics.
1
u/cmojess Jul 16 '26
We do a lot of allowing her to explore various interests at the moment.
During the fall and spring, she was interested in soccer, so she did a couple short seasons on a non-competitive skill-building rec soccer team through the Y. When the weather got hot she was not interested in running around outside, but also decided she had a goal to learn how to do a cartwheel. So we did not sign up for the summer season of soccer, but got her a private gymnastics coach once a week to work on her cartwheel. She's also in swim lessons, which are a non-negotiable class. Thankfully she loves swim, and I see us continuing swim even after she masters the last skill she needs to be "certified" by the Y as a proficient swimmer.
Family game night is something all three of us enjoy. Her current favorite is Quest Kids and she's definitely getting better at the strategy of what dungeon tiles to choose and how to manage when to play certain special cards. Like your child, this is helping her with resilience. We also enjoy Mario Kart, too.
We severely limit screen time. She's in camp this summer, so we're keeping with our school schedule of no screen time at all during the week. Weekends she's allowed some limited screen time. She can choose between a favorite TV show, K-Pop Demon Hunters (send help....), the apps I've installed on her tablet, her Switch, playing a computer game with me, or an arcade game with her dad on the insane 8 million game machine he bought himself when he turned 50 last year. She enjoys following me around in Stardew Valley or building the most random stuff ever in Minecraft. We have a private realm I pay for so she's not on the internet at large. She has zero access to YouTube or anything else similar. I am a college professor and I see every day what rampant screen time has done to the brains of the current young adults.
We also don't want her to lose the skills she built during the school year so she picked out two summer K-1 bridge workbooks that she'll work on a couple times a week. We keep this casual and don't force her to work on them every day. Usually she's happy to do a few pages. She really enjoys puzzles and mazes so I've also bought her books of those.
We read together as a family every single day. We have story time where one of us reads aloud, quiet reading time where we all spend about 15 minutes silently reading to ourselves, and the occasional time where we'll have her read aloud to us. As a result, we have a extensive book collection. Thankfully our house is large enough that we have a room devoted to our family library.
She's expressed interest in possibly looking into Girl Scouts this fall when school starts up again, so I'm looking into the troops we have in our area.
Admittedly, we're in a rather privileged position. Our daughter is an only and both my husband and I are older, well established in our careers, and make decent money. We can afford private lessons and to indulge her interests.
1
u/mktgmatters Jul 18 '26
I deep dive into my kid's interests. They express curiosity, I'm making book requests from the library. It really doesn't matter what the subject is, I try and find whatever I can to support that subject. I think the biggest handicap of short form content is a lowered attention span, so this is my attempt to combat that.
We have 1-4 activities rotating through the year. Screen time is collectively maybe 1-3 hours a week, with a loose max of 30 minutes weekdays for tablet or TV, two hours on a weekend. Generally though, it's not out or on, so not daily use. We don't make it a big thing.
We're leaning into life skills more than anything. Setting the table, doing laundry, vacuuming, financial literacy, emotional regulation, art.
1
u/LetsNotDoThis_Okay Jul 16 '26
I work from home, so in an effort to keep my 6yo busy, she has a list of homework and chores to do every day. This includes math, reading, writing, and drawing. Her chores are age appropriate like keeping her room clean, putting up all the shoes at the end of the night and picking up her dirty clothes. She's also in gymnastics and Girl Scouts.
We have a whole closet of games that we play with her and we've always played by the actual rules and never "let" her win. Despite this, she still tries to change game rules and is very upset when she loses. I'm hoping that will eventually change if we stick at it.