Imagine you are sitting on the bench as your team walks off of the field, their head's hanging low while the opposing team rushes to their star player hoisting the trophy up high. Picture yourself watching the head editor of the yearbook staff delete the layout and images that you spent hours perfecting, the votes for student council president being announced and seeing your name down at the very bottom with only a few votes. As much as administrators, coaches, teachers, and parents will tell kids over and over that extracurricular activities are an amazing experience, that is not always the case. Sometimes they are the root of not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well. An extracurricular activity is a personal choice that is extremely dependent on what goes on behind closed doors in a student's life. Requiring students to participate in at least one extracurricular activity would not be beneficial to every student because it could interfere with family commitments, possibly exclude and limit kids who are struggling in school or those with special needs and disabilities, and create an overly competitive and hostile environment.

Many families, especially those with financial troubles, rely on their children to take care of each other and the family as a whole. Requiring a student to participate in a very time-consuming activity on top of their pre-existing commitments to the welfare of their parents and siblings, in addition to homework can seriously damage their living conditions. In many cases the oldest child may have to pick up the younger siblings from school and watch them to ensure their well being. If you take away this student who is already taking on parental responsibilities, you could unintentionally cause a domino effect leading to the injury of a young child. When a family is struggling financially and one of their children is of working age, it is not uncommon for the teenager to begin working to try and gain more financial stability for their parents. Jobs and extracurricular activities are both very laborious and time consuming. This combination of responsibilities and time commitments would not work whatsoever, leading the student to have to make a choice that they don't have in attempting to decide between supporting their family's income and a sports team. Almost every child growing up had chores. I know I do, and a lot of them at that. From cooking dinner when parents are working late, to taking out the trash, to cleaning up after younger siblings spill something, there is an endless list of chores in a child's daily life. The homework that is already assigned can sometimes make a student spend an entire night only focusing on the piles of worksheets and reading that they have to do. In many cases, this cramming of homework can result in the incompletion of chores, much less having two hours of sports or yearbook after school as well. Adding even more time commitments onto the already packed schedule of a middle or high schooler is undoubtedly going to have severe consequences on family life.

By nature, extracurricular activities are competitive. Whether it's for a spot on the starting sports team, or one of the top editors in the yearbook, or the lead in the musical, or even the student council president, these are all competitions that extracurricular activities promote. These competitions may lead to a hostile environment inside the classroom or in the halls. Students can often go too far in competition, with both verbal and physical fights breaking out over some of the most trivial things. If we already have problems with hostility and people not understanding when they have taken something too far, how can we stop them from continuing this while essentially fanning the flame?

There is an extracurricular activity for everyone that can benefit them as well as leave them with good study habits, right? For students with learning disabilities and special needs, an extracurricular activity could become a nightmare in reality. Not only could physical disabilities impede a student's ability to play the sport that they want, but learning disabilities like dyslexia and ADHD can affect the student's ability to participate in some of the simpler stationary activities. If you look at the grade percentages in many schools, you can see that there is a large population of students that are seriously struggling in one or more classes, even with teacher's help after school. Studying for an upcoming test can be an hours long endeavor. Requiring a student to add a few more hours of extracurricular activities is ridiculous and can only have negative effects. Teachers are constantly preaching the importance of reviewing your materials every night and how you must complete all of your homework assignments in addition to unfinished classwork, but how can you do this if you barely even have time to sit down for dinner?

If we require students to participate in extracurricular activities, we are setting up multiple major issues like lack of time for family commitments, unintentionally putting students with special needs and learning disabilities at a disadvantage, and creating an overly competitive environment. While extracurricular activities can have benefits such as social skills and a healthier body, the risks associated with it outweigh the possibility of benefits for a smaller portion of the student body. We need to consider the effect on the smaller groups of people that are being put at a disadvantage before we make decisions with only a possibility of benefits. If we leave extracurricular activities as an optional choice, we eliminate the greater risk of social and mental health issues, exclusion of many different groups of people, physical fights, bullying, harassment, familial disarray, and many others.