Imagine yourself not just juggling four oranges, but plates are being tossed in for you to juggle too, and you gottta be so careful, you do not want it all to go to pieces with one plate dropped.

Don’t we put ourselves under that kind of pressure.  We want to be a great parent.  We expect so much of ourselves and our children that we miss out on living our life too.  The responsibilities and obligations that comes with parenting are enough.  Society puts pressure on the kids and the parents that kids need to be involved in all these clubs, sports, music, and maintaining a high gpa.  What will these kids be like when they are grown, will they know how to enjoy a quiet evening at home?  Will they know how to relax?  I am not talking about playing videogames or watching endless hours on the television in their room.

Can they do a good job without it having to be the number one spot?  Parents do not have time or energy to be married couples, and children do not have the time to relax and enjoy being a youth.  Fishing, skateboarding, building things, or making model cars, or rebuilding their bicycle or working on their car.

When raising our three sons, I had them taking piano in the winter and golf in the spring and summer with swimming.  Just one activity all were participating in.  I just did not feel capable of running them around all the time while carrying out my other obligations of work, domestics and ill health.  Saturday mornings every couple weeks we would do the Home Depot children’s shop where they made a different project each time.  As grown men, they know how to do many things and earn money doing these things.  My middle son lives in a tree house he designed and built, and he installed an elevator, and recently he used decks he was paid to remove from someone’s home, he used these decks very creativily to get up to his elevator and tree house.  It is so cool and we are proud of him for that.  They all know how to make or build anything they want or need.  (The Home depot has other classes to learn how to make and build things, even a woman’s class, check it out online and see, it is a fun activity)

In this age of joblessness, and the challenge of getting a respectable wage, and school loans that need to be repaid.  We really need to rethink the types of extracurricular activities we are keeping our children busy with.  Instead of worrying about whether they will be good enough to be picked for this or that.  Let us teach them to be good enough in daily living.  If we teach them to clean up after themselves, teach them to wash, dry and put away their clothes, teach them how to clean a bathroom, and how to wash floors, and how to manage money it could help them the rest of their life.  If they are slobs with these expectations that the parents and hired help are going to do everything, what kind of roommates will they be in a dorm, or if they want to share an apartment.  They will get kicked out and lose their deposit money.  What kind of marriage mates will they be if they cannot do these things.  Modern day woman do not want to carry the domestic load alone.  The day of a man coming home from work, grabbing a beer and sitting in front of a television for the next six or more hours are gone by.  Marriages like this are not surviving anymore.  It takes both mates to keep a house up.  My husband and sons all do their own laundry, and each has two nights a week of dishes and kitchen duties.  Tonight, one of them finished painting a bathroom for me, it took about twenty minutes for him to do it.

Success is not just career and home, it is family, and living our lives with those we love.  Whom says we have to overload our schedules with all these obligations.  Whom says we have to put all that stress on our children for them to be happy.  Do our children really have to play on some famous team for us to tell them well done.  Can’t we simplify our expectations and ease up the stress on ourselves and our children.  No one will be the lazier for it, but they might be the happier, more peace in the house since everyone isn’t running somewhere all the time.

There has to be a new balance considered.  It will benefit the marriages, and it will ease up some of this constant pressure on our youth.  Happy families are successful families.