I really need some advice here and I am hoping someone has been through this.
My son is 9 years old and he is the king of starting things. In the last two years alone, he has started football, then quit after three sessions. He joined a drawing class, loved it for two weeks, then refused to go back. We bought him a beginner guitar, he played it every day for a month, then it sat under his bed collecting dust. Right now we are three weeks into a coding club and I can already see the excitement fading from his eyes.
I am not trying to raise a robot who does everything perfectly. I just want him to build some follow through. Some sense of finishing what he started. I am starting to wonder if I am doing something wrong or if this is just who he is. Has anyone dealt with this? What actually worked for you?
Oh this hit close to home 
My daughter did the exact same thing from age 7 to about 11. We tried everything. Rewards, punishments, long talks at the dinner table. Nothing stuck.
What finally clicked for us was this: we stopped treating every activity like a lifetime commitment and started treating it like a trial run. We told her she had to give anything new at least 8 full sessions before deciding it was not for her. Not a month. Not a year. Just 8 sessions. That felt manageable to her and it also gave her enough time to actually get past the beginner frustration phase where everything feels hard and unfun.
The guitar situation you described is classic by the way. Week one feels magical. Week three hits and suddenly it is just hard work. That is exactly where most kids tap out. The magic wore off but the skill has not arrived yet. That gap is where you need to hold the line, gently.
With all due respect, has anyone considered that maybe the kid just has not found his thing yet? Like not every activity needs to be finished. Some things are just not a fit and forcing a child to stick with something they genuinely dislike can actually make them dread trying new things altogether.
I am not saying let him quit everything. But there is a difference between quitting because something is hard and quitting because it is genuinely not working. Parents sometimes mix those two up and end up turning what could be a fun exploration phase into a battleground 
GlassTech raises a fair point but I think OrbitXByteZone already knows the difference here. Three weeks into a coding club and the excitement is fading? That is not a bad fit. That is just the honeymoon phase ending. Every single hobby goes through that.
What helped with my son was making the progress visible. We put a simple chart on his wall for his swimming sessions. Every class he attended got a sticker. After 10 stickers he got to pick a family outing. Small thing but it made him feel like he was building toward something instead of just showing up and going home. He is now 14 and still swimming. I genuinely think that chart did more than any motivational speech ever could.
Welcome to parenting a child with a pulse. They all do this. Every single one of them. My nephew started karate, aikido, basketball, chess club, robotics camp, and a bread baking class. He is eleven. He has finished exactly zero of them. He is also the happiest kid I know.
I am kidding of course, there is real value in follow through. But can we just acknowledge for a second that we live in a world where adults switch careers five times and cancel Netflix subscriptions weekly? The quitting gene did not appear from nowhere 
one thing that worked really well for a family I know is sitting down with the child and asking them WHY they want to quit before accepting it. Not in a confrontational way. More like a curious conversation. Sometimes kids say they want to quit but what they are really saying is that they are bored, or they had a bad session, or their friend stopped coming, or the teacher is too strict.
When you dig into the actual reason, you often find it is fixable. And sometimes you find it is not, and that is okay too. But at least you are making an informed decision instead of reacting to a mood.
Something nobody is talking about yet is the role of the parent’s own reaction in these moments. Kids pick up on everything.
If your face falls every time they say they want to quit something, they start attaching guilt and shame to the idea of moving on. That can actually make them either push through things they hate just to keep you happy, or shut down completely and stop telling you how they feel.
Try staying really neutral when they bring it up. Something like okay tell me more about that. No sighing, no but we already paid for three months. Just listening. You might be surprised what comes out when they do not feel like they are about to disappoint someone.
I think WovenLap’s 8 session rule is genuinely smart and I want to add one thing to it.
Have the rule agreed upon BEFORE the activity starts, not after they want to quit. That changes everything. If you tell a kid the rule when they are already trying to leave, it feels like a trap. But if you sit down before the first class and say hey, our family rule is we give new things at least 8 tries before deciding, and they agree to it, then holding them to it later feels fair. It was their agreement too.
We did this with our twins and it genuinely reduced the mid activity meltdowns by a lot. They still tried to negotiate sometimes but at least we had something solid to point back to.
Not to derail but can I just say that the coding club one is interesting. My son went through something identical. Super excited for week one, quiet by week three, and then by week five he was asking me to help him build a game at home on weekends.
Sometimes the excitement shifts from the class to the thing itself. He stopped caring about the club environment but he had already caught the bug. So OrbitXByteZone, maybe watch for whether the interest is dying or just the social format of the class is not clicking. Those are two very different things and worth checking before pulling the plug.
Everything in this thread is great advice but I want to bring it back to something simpler.
Have you asked your son what HE thinks finishing something means? Because kids at that age sometimes have a completely different idea. To him, finishing the guitar might mean playing one full song. Not mastering it. Not performing it. Just playing one song all the way through.
If you can find out what success looks like to HIM and make that the goalpost instead of some external standard, you might find he is actually much more capable of seeing things through than you think. Define the finish line together. That small shift can make a big difference 
This whole thread is making me feel better about my own parenting struggles honestly.
One real thing that changed everything in our house: we started having a short conversation after every session, not just when they wanted to quit. Just two questions. What was hard today and what was good today. Nothing heavy. Takes five minutes in the car on the way home.
Over time it built this habit of reflecting instead of just reacting. And when my daughter did eventually want to stop something, she could actually articulate why in a way that made sense instead of just I don’t want to go anymore. It made the whole conversation feel less like a fight and more like a normal check in. Highly recommend trying it 