Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Drew answers a question about extracurricular activities.
Alix:
I have two boys, 9 and 11. They play sports. All the sports. So many sports. Every weekend is a jigsaw puzzle nightmare of who is taking which child to which sports. My shitty parents recently gave me a hard time about not putting them into arts or music programs, and then they accused me of being gendered in my approach, as if I wouldn't have thrown any hypothetical girl children of ours into sports. These boys like sports though. None of the sports are the super competitive kind, we're not flying across the country to soccer tournaments, we're just playing locally, mostly with their friends from the neighborhood or from school. This is what they enjoy! We don't push it! Are my judgmental parents right though? Should I be trying harder to make them do more arts or music?
You’re not officially a parent until your own parents pay a visit and tell you that you’re raising your children all wrong. If you’re lucky, you also get an earful from your in-laws about it! Always nice to have the people you love strategically rattle your confidence just as you’re trying to figure out life’s greatest responsibility.
It’s not easy to tune out this kind of backseat driving, but here is where I tell you that learning to do this is yet another vital parenting skill that you’ll eventually pick up along the way. Students at MIT have a less daunting course load. But I’m here to assure you that it can be done. Even if your parents’ criticism sticks in your craw long after they’ve pissed off back to their house (and it will), you can field their criticism politely in the moment and then ignore it entirely afterward. That way, your parents get to feel like they have their influence in the process, while you get to quash that influence to its necessary minimum.
Now, onto the matter of extracurriculars. My wife and I spent decades managing our children’s extracurricular activities. If one of the kids expressed an interest in something, we seized on that interest and vied to cultivate it. For example, when our daughter once mused out loud that she might want to take piano lessons, we sprang for both the lessons and the piano. When she liked a gymnastics kiddie day class so much that she wanted to try the real deal sport, we enrolled her at a nearby gym for training sessions. Why did we act so fast in both instances? Well, there was always the prospect of college applications looming over us, even when our kids were tiny. Those colleges wanna know you’re more than just your GPA, after all. There was also a shared desire, between my wife and me, to have our kids exposed to everything the world out there had to offer.
But above all else, we wanted our kids to do SOMETHING. They couldn’t just sit around the house all day, staring at screens and then complaining they had nothing to do. An idle child drives everyone batshit crazy, so we encouraged our kids to try various activities for their sake and our own. We focused especially hard on sports during the pandemic, because it was really the only thing our kids could do while out of the house. This resulted in our youngest son having a brief, doomed flirtation with flag football. But otherwise, we’ve tried not to emphasize one category of hobby above others. At a young age, it’s more important for kids to try MANY things, instead of jamming them into a single box marked FUTURE OLYMPIC SWIMMER. You shouldn’t force your own ambitions for your kids onto them. You have to give them the chance to discover their own ambitions, on their own.
This takes a long time, much longer than you’d prefer. Our daughter quit both piano and gymnastics when she was in middle school, only to later discover that she wanted to be an artist. Our oldest son went to toddler soccer camp when he was three and has been in love with the sport ever since, which also led him to becoming a sports editor for his high school newspaper. By contrast, our youngest son needed to test out dozens of different sports before he discovered tennis, which he now plays incessantly. We didn’t map out any of these paths for our kids in advance. We simply encouraged them to sample everything out there to find out what they liked and what they didn’t.
That’s true for children well beyond just sports and performing arts. Youth is for experimentation. Kids go to school to figure out what fields of study spark something inside of them. They shop for new clothes as a way of trying on a different personality. They try out different hairstyles and different friend groups. They might even question their gender identity. They’re discovering who they are and who they’d like to be. Your job as a parent is to support them in that search, and then to provide them with the skills, resources, and love they need to find what they’re looking for. Being pushy about it will only make them resent you and, even worse, discourage them from being their truest selves. Don’t let anyone, not even your own parents, tell you otherwise.
That said, if my wife and I ever plunked down $500 for two months of tee-ball because one of our kids asked us to try it, you better believe no one was allowed to quit that shit.
