The linear and nonlinear effects of organized extracurricular activities on Chinese Preschoolers’ development

•Extracurricular activities (EAs) are prevalent among Chinese preschoolers.•The influence of EAs on Chinese preschoolers’ development is studied.•There is a linear effect of EA participation on cognitive and language outcomes.•Participation in arts and sports is especially beneficial for children.•The overscheduling effect of EAs is found for social and language outcomes. How children spend time outside of school has consequences for their learning and development. Research on extracurricular participation has focused primarily on school-aged children and youth in Western societies. Yet, extracurricular activities are a common but understudied context of early development in Mainland China. In the present study, we employed the developmental model and the threshold model as a lens to examine the linear and nonlinear impact of extracurricular participation on three domains of development among 695 Chinese preschoolers. There are three main findings. First, there was partial support for the linear effect model (i.e., the developmental model). After controlling for demographic variables and children’s prior performance, extracurricular involvement was positively associated with children’s cognitive and language development, but not to social-emotional development. Second, there was also partial support for the overscheduling hypothesis (i.e., the threshold model). The results showed a quadratic effect of intensity, breadth, and total number of extracurricular activities on children’s social-emotional development, as well as a quadratic effect of the breadth of extracurricular participation on children’s language development. Finally, we extended the traditional overscheduling hypothesis by examining how duration of extracurricular involvement interacted with three other dimensions of involvement. The results suggest that increasing the number or intensity of extracurricular activities would benefit children’s language development when participation duration was relatively short. However, these influences became neutral at average levels of duration and harmful in cases of very long duration. Implications of our findings are discussed.