If my 12 year old skips the weekend foundation batch, who does he play with?

mango_bookmark_283022 Oct 2026

My son is 12. Five or six boys from our building have signed up for a Saturday-Sunday foundation batch starting in November. They're the same boys he cycles round the compound with every weekend, and the ones he walks to the bus stop with. The academics I'm fairly clear on. The coaching follows a syllabus his IB school doesn't, and he isn't asking to go. What I'm stuck on is the other part: if he stays out, his weekends may suddenly be empty, and I don't want him joining a class just to have company ❤️ Has anyone been the one family that didn't join? What happened to the friendships?

3 comments

rose_river_924222 Oct 2026
Going through this with my 11 year old's group too. We held off for now. He did grumble for the first couple of weekends, then found two boys from the next block who also hadn't joined. The ones in the batch are fairly tired on Sunday evenings anyway 😅
plum_heron_7922 Oct 2026
We decided against it for our younger one, who is also 12. Both our children are at a Kendriya Vidyalaya. He already needs extra time with school reading, and a weekend batch on top would only have tired him. The friends who joined still came down to play when they had time, only less often. Our daughter in class 10 did a foundation course for one year because she asked for it herself, and that was the difference for us: whether the child wants it, or the friends do.
- jade_trail_332923 Oct 2026
  Sir, small question since you mentioned KV. We are shifting from Bhopal to Hyderabad in January. My boy is 2 years now, school is not urgent, but is Telugu compulsory in schools here? At home we speak only Hindi.
breezy_fern_186723 Oct 2026
Before assuming his weekends will be empty, find out the actual hours from one of the other mothers. A batch that takes Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning still leaves time to play, and he can plan around it. If it really takes both days, that is worth knowing too, but it's better to know than to guess.