How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Some of this activity benefits our children. There’s the obvious: they’re exposed to different ideas and ways of learning, and they try out new things. Activities and sports tend to retain a certain ruthlessness that’s missing in many classrooms: there are winners and losers and place ranks and chairs. Competitive activities give children space to try and fail and lose and build. Then there’s the research: children who are more involved outside school engage in fewer risky behaviors, like drug use, delinquency, and sexual activity, and their participation has been linked to more opportunities for career advancement, as well as higher grades and graduation rates.

  The key word there is “some.” Kids who participate in some after-school activities are better off than those who, usually because of lack of resources, do none. But as far as I know, there is no research suggesting that a child who does gymnastics and Kumon and Suzuki violin and soccer and robotics has an edge over the child who is deprived of robotics, or that twelve months a year of soccer are better than four. When did it get so hard to draw that line?

  It’s not your imagination. Sports and activities really have changed since your childhood. Not only are there more options, but even the familiar choices seem to have gone mad. A sport you remember involving a short season of one or two practices during the week and a game on Saturday has morphed into one with two practices and a skills session during the week, two or more games (possibly involving travel) on the weekend along with several tournaments, off-season play, and the opportunity (or expectation) for players to participate in dedicated camps over holidays or work individually with a skills coach. The once-a-week music lesson, with daily practice and an occasional recital, has become one individual and one group session a week, with an expectation that parents will sit in on the lessons and practices as well as purchase the CD in order to play the music being learned on an eternal loop at home and in the car.

  For some of us the simpler options—the recreational sports program, the music teacher down the block—are still out there. But the commoditized versions of sports and activities are seductive in so many ways, and in many communities, they’ve almost fully eclipsed everything else, extending their reach younger and younger until smaller programs can’t compete and pulling many families into their wake. The travel associated with youth sports has become a $7 billion recession-proof boon to the economies of hosting towns. Of all trips taken in 2012, 27 percent were for the sole purpose of attending a sporting event, with some 53 million young athletes traveling for the sake of sport.

  Parents, of course, could say no to all this, but there are reasons, some good and some more dubious, why we don’t. For starters, our children don’t come to us and ask, “Can I play soccer four nights a week, practice through dinner time, and do my homework in the car while we drive to the three games on the weekend, including a four-hour round-trip away game that starts at eight a.m.?”

  Instead, “Can I play soccer?” starts with a cute little weekend team. The kids are outside, not at home in front of their screens, and if you’re having to stand on the sidelines more than you might like, well, if you were both at home you’d be trying to entertain a preschooler, not settled in over your own book or hobby. It seems win-win.

  But after the cute little weekend team, things change. One parent helpfully invites your child to play in a post-season league, or your child tells you that “all the players who are any good” are trying out for the local club. The friend she played defense with is doing a soccer camp next summer; can she go?

  And maybe the club team seems like a great plan. Then the enthusiastic coach adds an extra tournament, and the home club decides to host one, to bring in some money. The games start on Fridays, the better to get lots of teams involved, which means missing school and work. That’s not the call you would make—but the team is small. If you say no for your daughter, they have little chance of winning the first games. Or maybe the team is big, and a child who misses the first games is out for the tournament as far as the coach is concerned. And don’t forget—your child cares. This is her team. She’s loyal. You’ve taught her that it’s important not to quit, that we don’t skip practices and games just because we feel like it. Suddenly, you’re down the rabbit hole.

  Soccer is its own form of madness, but nearly every activity you can name has grown its own extremes. Children can compete locally and nationally in spelling bees—or in bees for geography or history. There are math bowls, chess bowls, and a seemingly endless array of robotics competitions and science fairs; there are theater and improv and art competitions, comic book–writing workshops, community orchestras, choirs, and bands. Some of this may sound familiar, but as in soccer, the frequency, intensity, and expectations have changed.

  “It’s tough to say no” to a child who thinks she wants to move up a level in an activity, says Sarah Powers, a mother of three in Southern California, who grew up as a dancer and then taught studio dance for many years. “Bigger studios are adding younger and younger ‘companies’ that train for performances and competitions, and there’s extreme pressure put on girls to join. They feel very left out if they don’t—they’re not going to the competition, they’re not eligible for solos, they don’t have the sweatshirt with the logo.” These “higher levels” are professionally packaged to be very appealing for our kids, and they’re money-makers for the adults on the selling end.

  But before we absolve ourselves of all parental blame for sports and activity scheduling, consider that parents are the drivers, literally and figuratively, of all this madness. The seasons wouldn’t extend, the summer camps wouldn’t fill, the studios wouldn’t be in business, if we weren’t buying into it all. We get involved ourselves, maybe in our child’s success or maybe in the community that forms around these activities. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—if it’s making you and your child happy, and not taking something away from the rest of your family.

  That is the million-dollar question. Our children’s sports and activities can contribute to their happiness, and to ours. They can be a source of joy and pride for the whole family. Or they can take over our lives, spreading like kudzu into every area that’s not concreted with other obligations and sometimes managing to invade those. How do we strike a balance that’s right for us?

  Making It Better

  A happy family life that includes sports and activities for your kids is one that works for both or all of you, most of the time. One survey (from HopSkipDrive, a ride service for kids) found that 35 percent of parents described managing their child’s school and extracurricular transportation arrangements as more stressful than filing their taxes. Unless you’re a tax accountant, that’s not a good sign. And if your kids aren’t getting enough playtime and downtime, they’re probably not benefiting from their extracurricular activities as much as you think. High schoolers participating in fifteen to twenty hours of extracurricular activity a week have more emotional problems like depression and anxiety, sleep less, and report higher stress levels. That’s not a recipe for happy teenagers, or happiness for the families they live with.

  There’s not some master amount of activity that suits everyone. But there are things to keep in mind as you make decisions for or with your child. Many sports and activities snowball as children get older, leaving us with a sense that things are out of our control—but that isn’t necessarily the case. As I’ll explore later in the chapter, parents who push back against the pressure to conform to outside expectations about how children will participate often find that there’s more give in the system than they expected or that they’re happier helping their children find a way to explore an interest off the beaten path. The mistake many of us make is to equate the activity itself with fun and happiness and not consider how its various demands will affect our child, our family, and ourselves.

  Protect Your Sanity

  You can’t possibly predict everything, but when you start thinking about signing your child u
p for anything, whether it’s violin or soccer, go ahead and project wildly into the future. Think first just a little down the road: What obligations are there this season? What expectations do coaches or instructors have? Will there be other families or children indirectly depending on yours? Signing up for a small Lego robotics team, for example, means committing to the competition and possible success, which leads to more competitions. A big team may have room for some absences; a small one will rely on every member.

  If there’s an end-of-season event, do you have to be part of it—and do you really want to? When Sarah Powers signed her daughter up for ballet lessons at four years old, she expected children in leotards, following simple instructions without too much structure, once a week. That’s how the class went, but as the end of the session approached, a recital was announced, with accompanying extra rehearsal times and fees. “Most people just do it,” she said. “Your kid gets excited about the tutu, and $200 later, you’re keeping a four-year-old happy at a four-hour-long recital.” Powers is, as she put it, “aggressive about protecting my own sanity.” There will be lots of recitals if her daughter continues in dance. The family can skip this one.

  Look at how an activity will impact your whole family, including you and younger siblings. Ever since Powers found herself playing cards with a preschool-age child while trying to entertain a toddler in a tiny waiting room outside of her oldest child’s music lesson, she’s thought about what the other children will do during an activity—because unless you drive and pay a babysitter, or have two babysitters, that’s how these things work. “Softball has a playground,” she says, so they like that, and the new music teacher has a play space for siblings. “I don’t really do the iPad thing,” she says. “It would make it a lot easier, but I’m not sure it’s important enough to plug everyone else in.”

  Be realistic about the time commitment. “An hour of soccer takes us two and a half hours,” says Lisa Damour, the author of Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and the mother of two girls, thirteen and six. “It takes us forty-five minutes to find your stuff and transition you into the car and get you there, and then forty-five minutes to get away and get home and get you cleaned up. It’s supposedly three hours a week, and we do have three hours a week, but do we have seven and a half hours a week?” Maybe they do, she says, but doing that math right makes it easier to make that decision and to work with it.

  Protect Your Child’s Sense of Self

  It is a piece of the madness of many of the most popular children’s activities that instructors or coaches expect you and your child to put their thing, be it dance or violin or baseball, “first.” When a conflict comes up, they tell you, a real dancer/violinist/team player would know what to choose, even at seven years old.

  That can too quickly lead to a child and family who have chosen—and dropped the conflicting interests aside. As important as it is to keep a grip on your scheduling madness, specialization is another possible route to unhappiness through your child’s sports. “I see so many girls whose identities are all wrapped up in soccer,” says Damour, who is also a consulting psychologist at a girls’ school in Ohio. “They tear their ACL, and then they lose everything.” Their friends, their social life, their free time, has been all caught up with the team, and now it’s gone, at least temporarily. “It sneaks up on you,” she says. “You sign up a six-year-old, and all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed, and then it blows up and you have a teenager with an identity crisis. No one plans for that.”

  You can’t design a childhood around the risk of an injury, but you can look at every activity as just a piece of your child’s bigger life, and talk and act accordingly. The big music or dance studio may be incompatible with another commitment, but a smaller one might be more understanding. Less sought-after activities, like cartooning classes and after-school a cappella groups or squash, might demand less time and commitment.

  You also can’t control how your child thinks of herself, but you can control the way you talk about her priorities with her, and how rich her life is outside of even something she’s passionate about. Most kids won’t get an injury that ends their ability to sit at the piano, but they might realize, suddenly or gradually, that they’re ready to move on. You can help protect their happiness, and yours, by helping your child keep eggs in a lot of baskets, even if they seem to have found a passion. Encourage kids to continue to try new things, maybe by joining an activity with a friend or sibling or even a parent, and to develop skills in multiple arenas.

  What if Your Child Wants to Quit?

  It’s hard to be happy when you’re dragging a child somewhere she doesn’t want to go or negotiating minutes of music practice with someone who is shouting, “But I don’t want to play the violin!” What should you do when your child wants to quit something, whether it’s a sport she’s played for years, a musical instrument, a class she just signed up for, or a team midseason?

  This is a very family- and child-specific dilemma, but there are a few generally accepted practices.

  No quitting in the middle (mostly). Many parents say they won’t let a child quit “midway,” whether that’s a season, a month of lessons, or a class session, and especially not if there’s a commitment to others involved. But there are exceptions.

  “I let my son quit a really rigorous travel football program midseason in eighth grade,” says Annie Micale Webb, a mother from Philadelphia. “I finally realized I had to listen to him and honor his real distaste for the whole thing. Sticking with his commitment to the team (what I wanted) was going to be physically and emotionally too much for him. When I stopped standing my ground only for my own preconceived notions and really listened to my child, I knew letting him quit was the absolute right thing.”

  Suz Lipman, a mother in San Francisco, let her daughter quit high school mock trial early in her third season. “She was very unhappy, and we knew from her previous two seasons how very much work it was. Her high school team went to state and national championships. So when she said she really wasn’t into it anymore, had nothing else to gain, kind of wanted to play outside and have more free time, we agreed. It was early enough for the team to recruit other kids.”

  Kids do the quitting. The whining child often talks about quitting, and might even ask, “Can’t I just stop going?” When there’s any kind of a relationship involved, with a coach, a studio teacher, or an instructor, many parents who are willing to let a child quit will tell her that she can choose to do it, but she has to do it herself.

  Putting the onus on your child makes her a part of the decision-making process, which is especially important if she started the sport or activity young enough not to have made a real choice. It might not have occurred to her that she had a choice, and giving her the power to stop can become a way to help your child think about what an activity means to her and what it would mean if it weren’t part of her life. She might still decide she’s finished (so this should never be an idle threat on your part), but it can’t be done on a whim. When Huntington, New York, mother Denise Schipani’s son (now thirteen) was eight, he told her he wanted to quit piano after two years of lessons. Schipani told him he could talk to his teacher about it; at the next lesson, he asked her if she was going to do it for him. “I said, ‘If you want to quit, you have to talk to her about it.’” He didn’t want to do it himself, and he didn’t suggest quitting again. “I suspect he was looking for an easy way out, and it’s not my job to give him that,” she says. “I think he was testing out the idea,” she says, to see how it felt for him and how his parents reacted. When it didn’t fly, he let it go. “He also became a better player,” she says, as did his brother, now fifteen. Both boys enjoy playing because it’s become something they’re good at, she says—and the family just invested in a new piano.

  No quitting when you’re down. There’s a right time to quit—after a season or session, after some thought, after talking it
over with your parents and the right other people—and there’s a wrong time: after you don’t make the top team, lose out on the solo, or don’t get first chair.

  When kids are disappointed, they say a lot of things. That’s not the time to let them act on them and quit—or, for that matter, the time to let them sidestep their disappointment by switching to a different league or trying out for a different youth orchestra. And if you’re the one pushing the move, or if you’re gaming the system by letting your child go to a bunch of different tryouts in order to take the best spot she’s offered, I suspect you’ve lost sight of why your child is playing. Your actions are also making other parents and children unhappy when orders and teams are constantly reshuffled (making it clear who “made” it last). Even if your child doesn’t complain, constantly switching studios or soccer clubs is hard on a kid, and never having to deal with not being at the top of her activity doesn’t help her grow.

  Go with your gut. Kids start things early, and sometimes it’s time to let sports and extracurriculars go. People, including children—especially children—change. Evolving isn’t necessarily quitting. When Laura Hudgens’s twelve-year-old son chose not to play baseball after playing for six years, she knew it would be hard. “But it took up most of the summer and prevented him from doing other spring and summer activities he loves that my husband loves, too, like camping and canoeing. We let him make the decision, helping him see the pros and cons, and also that whatever he decided there would be some regret.” That’s been true, the Berryville, Arkansas, mother says. They both miss the baseball community. “He gave up something he loves in order to do other things he loves. But ultimately we all feel good about his choice.”