Children benefit more from spending time with their grandparents than from organised after-school activities.

Some people think that children learn more from their grandparents than from clubs and lessons after school. In my opinion, both are useful, but time with the family is more important.

Firstly, grandparents give children a lot of attention. Parents today are very busy with work, and in a club there is one teacher for fifteen or twenty children. A grandmother can sit with one child, listen to all his stories and answer all his questions. This attention helps the child to feel safe and loved.

Secondly, grandparents teach traditions and family history. They tell stories about the past, about the village where the family lived, and about relatives the child never met. Children cannot learn these things at school or in a sport club, and if grandparents do not tell them, this information disappears forever.

On the other hand, organised activities also have benefits. A child can learn to swim, to play the piano or to play football, and these skills need a professional teacher. In addition, in a club the child meets other children of the same age and learns to work in a team, which is important for the future.

In conclusion, I agree that time with grandparents is more valuable, because attention and family knowledge are things that only the family can give. However, the best situation is when a child has both.

It is sometimes claimed that children gain more from time spent with their grandparents than from the organised activities that increasingly fill their afternoons. I broadly agree, though not because clubs are unhelpful — rather because the two provide different things, and what grandparents offer has become far harder to obtain.

Time with grandparents is characteristically unstructured and unassessed, and that is precisely its value. Almost every other hour of a modern childhood has a purpose attached to it: lessons are graded, sports are competitive, and even play is often supervised towards some developmental end. An afternoon with a grandparent is one of the few settings in which a child is simply accompanied rather than improved, which is where unhurried conversation and genuine curiosity tend to appear. There is also a continuity that nothing else supplies — stories about relatives, places and events that vanish permanently if they are not passed on directly.

Organised activities nevertheless do things families cannot. Learning an instrument or a sport properly requires structured teaching and consistent practice, and few grandparents can offer either. Clubs also place children among peers outside their own family, which is where negotiation, rivalry and cooperation are actually learned. For working parents, moreover, these activities provide reliable supervision, and describing that as merely convenient understates how necessary it is.

In conclusion, I agree with the statement, but on grounds of scarcity rather than superiority. Structured enrichment is widely available and increasingly abundant; unhurried adult attention and living family memory are not, and a childhood is poorer for lacking them than for lacking another club.

Claims of this kind are difficult to evaluate until the comparison is made precise, because time with grandparents and time at a football club are not competing to deliver the same thing. Once the question is put as which supplies what a child is more likely to be short of, I think the statement is broadly right — though for reasons its supporters rarely give, and with an exception they rarely acknowledge.

What has become genuinely scarce in a modern childhood is unstructured attention. Almost every hour is now instrumentalised: lessons are assessed, sport is competitive, and even free time is frequently supervised towards some developmental outcome that an adult has in mind. Against that background, the distinguishing feature of an afternoon with a grandparent is that nothing is being optimised — the child is accompanied rather than improved. It is in that unhurried setting, without the tacit pressure to perform, that the wandering conversations and unembarrassed questions tend to happen. A second good is even less substitutable: grandparents hold a family's memory, and unlike a swimming certificate it cannot be acquired later. When it is not transmitted directly it is simply lost.

Organised activities are not thereby diminished; they do things no family can. Real competence in an instrument or a sport requires structured instruction and deliberate practice, and children learn negotiation and rivalry among peers rather than among indulgent adults. For working parents they are also the infrastructure that makes employment possible, which is not a small consideration dressed up as a large one.

The reason I still favour the statement is that these benefits show diminishing returns while the other does not. A child with four scheduled activities gains little from a fifth, whereas almost no child in that position has a surplus of unhurried adult attention. The comparison is therefore not between two goods of equal availability but between one that is abundant and one that is increasingly rare.

Two qualifications keep this honest. The benefit is contingent on the grandparents being present, willing and benign, and a substantial number of children have none available — for whom clubs are not a lesser option but the only one. And the claim holds at the margin: it argues against replacing family time with a further activity, not against organised activity as such. Within those limits, I agree.