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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

We have really made it a point to have our kid play freely as much as possible and minimize scheduled activities (piano lessons etc.) the problem is that most of his friends are in a million classes so even if he’s free, they often aren’t.

That’s been the big challenge. So then there are these magical days where they all don’t have any activities and those invariably happen to be the days ALL kids look forward to. Cuz at the end of the day, they just want to play with their friends.

But that has taken planning in the past where we coordinate with parents for those free play days.

But those days are the exception. I wish they were the rule.

We’ve actually noticed how amazing his mood is after a day full of unorganized play hanging out with friends.

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I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only way we can get him out is to call other parents and schedule something.

There is something deeply wrong here. I blame other parents who overschedule their kids.

> I blame other parents

Ah, the mantra of our parental lives!

These classes kids go to aren’t always some kind of arduous, academic overachiever factory. My kid goes to a Spanish immersion after school program once a week and she loves it. She’s made a ton of friends there. We’re not shoving her through the door.

Don’t get me wrong, some parents do go over the top with it, no doubt. But a lot of these activities are genuinely enriching.

It's not about your kid going to a Spanish class once a week, and the objection isn't that doing that isn't enriching for your kid.

The problem is over the holidays when all your kid's friends have been sent to camps and summer schools (mostly as a form of holiday childcare for working parents presumably) or taken away on holiday, leaving your kid with nobody to play with. It presumably varies a lot but it's a real thing in our and our childrens' lives. The summer holidays should be filled with friends and play, not spent at home with your parents because nobody's available.

I still prefer my kid I'm camp or summer school over the kid on Netflix or Steam or whatsapp whole day. Or over me forcing them away from the above after which they still don't go play outside with friends, because friends watch anime or play video game.

Boredom can be a great breeding ground for creativity.

This is absolutely true, but the problem is that we are oversaturated with time-wasters that prevent that kind of deep, creativity-breeding boredom. There's always another phone game, another show, more social media -- and these things were specially designed to hold your attention and prevent you from being "good bored". South Park nailed it with their discussion about how the problem with doing pot as a kid is that it makes you OK with being bored. Well, now we have millions of things like that.

Road trips. I remember those wonderful long boring trips before our girls had phones.

Oh, and even after, gee, sorry, not charging phones when on the road.

Yes, this culture of parents scheduling play dates drives me insane. And even if you try to schedule, everyone is so busy. Kids have karate and 30 minutes later baseball and that's after school. It so much different from our childhood and we struggle to integrate into it.

When I first heard about play dates it reminded me of a scene in The Devil's Advocate where one of the wives of the lawyers said that whenever she wants to see her husband, she has to schedule an appointment.

It's tough but doable. You have to get on people's calendars a week or two out whenever you can, and if you're lucky, it eventually turns into easy, low-stress, open-ended playdates.

Meeting other parents is a huge effort, though! It's basically dating all over again. If your kids ride the school bus, that's a big help because you automatically meet nearby parents who are home in the afternoon. Otherwise, you have to go to lots of events and ask parents for their phone numbers, but the majority don't work out for random reasons.

I think the parent is not so much complaining that it's doable, more that the concept of play dates as a thing at all is what's infuriating. I agree with this as well.

When I was young, my parents knew the parents of maybe one or two of my friends, and that was only largely because they knew each other from somewhere else. We didn't need to have our parents organize and sync up their schedules to go play together. We'd just go and meet up. If no one was around outside, might go up and knock on the door of a few friends see if they wanted to do something. But ultimately, we had largely free reign to ourselves.

Now, at a later age, I also really wouldn't want to have to get to know the parents of my kids' friends either. Meet once or twice to get to see them face-to-face, maybe get some basic contact info just in case, but for the most part, I don't really want my kids' social relationships to be based on how well I can get along with other parents (with a few small exceptions.)

Blaming other parents is great and probably correct, but putting blame on things outside of your control is a cop out.

Why don't you move to an area that's not like that, or you go an play with your kid at the park until other kids show up.

or build an app that makes the makes scheduling the play time very seamless.

Yeah dude why don't you take your 14 year-old to the park to play with their mom or just launch a startup to solve this problem.

It's actually a great opportunity to teach your kid to code so they can learn to solve their own problems by learning to launch their own startups.

Teaching your kid to code is not even close to replacing social interaction with their peers. (In case your comment wasn't sarcasm)

I met some of my current friends not from school, but from seeing them at the park or in the neighborhood while playing, walking, or biking around.

As someone that was always surprised at how much more free time I had compared to other kids back in my school days - I'm still very much in support of limited structured activities. Me and the boys would just goof off on bikes and in backyards. This was 15-10 years ago.

I'd talk to people in class and they'd claim to have like 1 or two hours free between school and sleep. And I had something like 8 hours free. What the hell?

Same here besides some travel ball that screwed up a couple summers for me when I was a pre-teen. I ended up getting burnt out with baseball and quit. Besdies that, from my earliest memories to about 20 I screwed off basically 95% of the time and had a blast. Still ended up going to a top notch university, although it was a struggle for me at first.

Fast forward to present day and my kids are beginning to build ramps for their bikes just like I used to do - and I'm right out there with them building so I can shred on my MTB just like the old days lol.

The neighbors have been gone every weekend to a different part of the state or another state entirely for 8U baseball, and I can't help but feel sorry for them as someone who went through the same thing as a kid.

I'm at the age where I'm seeing the endgame of this, our cohort of kids & friends are applying to college. They did all these after-school activities, tutors, sports, etc. They were over programmed over achievers. And guess what, even with their 4.5 GPAs and impressive resumes, they aren't getting into the colleges they want (University of California). So what was the point of all that?

This is the result of NIMBY, but for education. Same as the housing market - once you're in it, you're invested in housing prices not going down (and certainly not build-build-build as we should be doing).

What we should have done is expand access to elite colleges commensurate with demand, and thereby dilute the status of the "elite" college. Harvard still accepts ~2000 people, around the same as 40 years ago, even though demand has skyrocketed. That is basically leading to more and more competition over the same slots, same as the bidding wars in the housing market. And all of the alumni of the University get to ride the wave of more and more exclusivity (they benefit from a low acceptance rate), so this is unlikely to change.

Artificial scarcity rules the day.

Better to not have “elite” colleges at all.

Agreed. We're at a point where if you want to get into a top college, you have to be interesting. You must have done something unusual, ambitious, creative, or anything beyond sports or band or violin and a bunch of AP courses.

Guess what? Kids who have never had time to play are ones who have never had time to develop cool interests.

Jack Nicholson said it best (repeatedly): All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Why this burning desire to go to a top college?

I know enough of those who went to these so-called top tier colleges, meanwhile I took my time getting through an average college, but nonetheless exploring interests, making eclectic friends.

Most people around me were treating life like a sprint - My young self even back then knew it was a marathon.

I am not saying be aimless but don't drive yourself crazy at this altar of success - it will come, but there are life lessons you learn in your 20s - that are the foundation for a better life later.

Because the kids now, and their parents, have mostly gone through an education system that constantly hammers you on how you need to get into the top college, you must go to college, you should be taking as many AP classes as possible to get into a top college. They've had 30 or so years to be propagandized into believing it.

There was also definitely a strong undercurrent of first-generation immigrants to the US pushing their kids hard, because they had no reason to distrust the message that if you want to succeed in the US, you need to go to a top college so you can get a good job.

Given that the anime waifu crowd is a huge reason why AI image generation is moving as fast as it does, it's probably better for society that he becomes a weeaboo. It's thankless work but someone has to label all the images on the -booru websites for the good of humanity (unironically).

I used to think parents who overscheduled their kids were reacting to incentives put in place by college admissions offices and secondary selective admissions schools, and ultimately employers who demand elite credentials.

But as I've studied this issue and experienced life, it seems to be the case that credentials are in reality overrated compared to competence and experience. The vast majority of colleges will admit anyone, and the vast majority of employers requiring a degree just ask that you have a degree of any kind.

So now I think parents should just chill, not because it's the altruistic strategy in game theory, but because that's how the actual labor market works. Parents are killing themselves and their kids for no reason.

This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older. Everybody is busy with their lives and coordinating even with your closest friends leads to 'agenda conflicts' that push your time together weeks or months ahead. It's sad to see that this is happening to kids (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.

> (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.

Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries.

Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss when talking about american childrens typical day in school.

Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.

Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.

Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...)

Would love to see updated numbers on it.

I think you’re confusing things a bit. Of course someone will be more successful at doing thing x if they are scheduled to do thing x.

That is good for planning/preparing for the future.

Being scheduled to the gills means that the ‘now’ is constantly filled with planning/preparing/doing things for the future though.

And with no time for the present or for being able to think/daydream.

I'm not confusing it. I'm questioning if people are really more scheduled today.

Especially as we get to middle and high school. Many of us had jobs back then. Isn't uncommon for many small businesses to have a lot of help they use their children for. Not even going back to farms. Though, hard not to see all of the chores that many of those would have around the place as scheduled.

Edit: Tried to stealth fix, but I did flip a less to a more at the top there. Apologies for anyone that may respond to my mistake there.

Ah! I’m not sure if I saw your post before the edit or not. To respond to what you’re saying..

I’m not 100% sure what is real and what is selection bias. What is due to class shifts, increased income earning, etc. too. This seems like something that should have studies around it with actual data, but I couldn’t find it directly with a quick search.

All I’ve personally experienced is seeing parents (and myself) struggle to get kids into various activities due to the huge demands on our own time/mental energy, and trying to figure out how to get a good outcome for the kids from it. All of these folks I know were either from low middle and now high middle, or high middle and still high middle class backgrounds.

Upper class type folks already had a set of things they ‘did’, and while there was competition, it looked different.

I found [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6720124/] which is quite interesting, but that also seems to be oriented around ‘what do various types of extracurricular activities/after school social interactions actually produce’.

Which is very interesting, and goes more to the outcome as compared to changes over time.

I think we are aligned. I certainly am more exposed to this as a parent than I remember seeing it as a kid. I can look back and remember all of my friends had sports/music/church/etc far more than I did, though.

That is, I feel it acutely, but not clear how much of this is the biases you named. Would love to see studies. I also failed finding any. I also agree it is almost certainly studied.

I myself went to music lessons for a bit and did take some extra classes to catch up. But it was an hour or two a week here and there. I still had 4 out of 5 afternoons to myself any given year. And no stuff on weekends. It’s incomparable to kids schedules today.

To be fair, my schedule got quite busy in final years. But it was because I started building websites for €€€. But I doubt it’s comparable to parents-scheduled extracurricular activities. And I learned programming in my free unstructured time by myself.

Doesn't make a difference for college admission, and it likely will not for a long time. It's mostly grades that decide who get's into college and bologna affirms that you have a free choice on where to attend. It does make sense to prepare your child for college in such a way that it is able to live self sufficiently and teach discipline in learning, but no university gives a crap on what debate club you ran in high school.

Discipline is one of those things that are truly important. But I don’t think parents-overscheduled activities help that much with it. Otherwise discipline goes out the window when nobody is on your shoulder anymore.

Learning to live self sufficiently is better with unstructured time IMO. When you have to learn to put together your own schedule, follow it and do day-to-day tasks. It’s horrible how many kids can’t make themselves dinner and clean up the house after themselves. Because kid is always busy and mommy takes care of everything because little 18 y/o is so tired. Of course it doesn’t help that in many cases mommy can’t do much better than microwave dinner or order a takeout :/

> this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures

This is a major thing in many East Asian cultures as well, China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea. Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm, so that kids aren't studying past midnight, but some academies still stay open secretly as the parents are demanding the extra hours. It's a vicious circle: kids compete for the few spots in top universities so they can get into the best companies, average qualifications rise, so next generation have to compete even harder for the same few spots.

This is carried over to the US as well. Asians compete for the few spots in top universities, as they are held to higher standards already, and this just keep ratcheting up the average standard for Asians each generation.

I'm not familiar with this custom, but wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim? Surely after some point you hit diminishing returns, and after that it becomes downright damaging (in terms of mental health etc). So I'd expect the cycle to balance itself after a while, with parents eventually recognizing the importance of downtime. What gives?

(I suppose the answer is that there's an economic incentive in squeezing your kids into a pressure cooker of endless commitments, to the point where the pros outweigh the cons; but this assumption makes me feel like I'm being unfairly cynical to the parents in question.)

Depends. If you think it is just diminishing returns, than you always get more the more you put in. Just not as much. You have to drop to negative returns for that to go away.

And indeed, in that framing, it is going to be tough to make it so that those who can afford to spend their time shouldn't do so.

So, are there policies where we could make it so that folks can put a legit value in the things they are neglecting for this extra spend in time? I can certainly hope so.

You end up with generational trauma, Asian parents who were worked to the bone as children, saw peers find higher-paying jobs as a result, the people who had mental breakdowns are presumably brushed aside and viewed as a source of shame, many keep grinding through the system because the alternative is poverty as a farmer, end up with scars repressed and treating their children the same way... and the children who break from the pressure bond over the Internet and try to treat each other with kindness, but are often unable to provide for each other because they're too mentally scarred to find jobs and make a living.

> wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim?

Depends on what you mean. Afterschool activities often include sports, so there's some balance between academics and physical activities, but physical activities won't get you into a good school unless you are at a competitive level, so there are high pressures there as well.

As for parents who recognize the importance of downtime? The ones that can afford it... send their kids overseas. But of course, even with added downtime, those kids are more academically competitive, so they end up ratcheting up the standards in the area they go to.

After bedtime, I would grab a book, creep into the bathroom, and hop into the dry bathtub to read. I preferred this to a flashlight under the covers.

Mom would find me, send me back to bed, and shame me for reading. Then I was further shamed and humiliated when I was fitted for spectacles in third grade. Of course my parents blamed myopia on reading books in poor lighting.

That bathroom was actually the site of innumerable playtimes for me. Battleships and Cartesian divers in the tub, Rubik's cube maintenance, trying to get my alligator lizard to drink from the tap. It was a dingy, dusty playground where I felt kinda safe and clean.

Question is, what did you read? I don't think these kids going to night school are there to read popular youth literature.

TFA subject is "Play".

Myopia is caused by spending time indoors without full wavelength sun exposure btw. Two hours outdoors when the sun is bright should be enough.

Hindsight is 20/20!

Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm

similarly, china banned private afterschool services for school subjects. i don't know how effective the ban is, but their argument was similar.

I am in Europe, have friends in 4 different countries and extracurriculars are a thing in all of them.

> This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older.

Bring back the pop-in!

A pop in? Where a friend just shows up unannounced with a knock at your door and a tip of the hat and says they were just in the neighborhood and felt like they should drop and has a seat on your couch?

Sure. Maybe they catch you at an awesome time, maybe they don't and they leave- it's a pop-in after all. Keep expectations low. At least you saw them.

That goes back to a time when most homes had a stay-at-home homemaker.

Today, I'm not really crazy about the idea of a random pop-in, having to cut the few hours of time that I do have for laundry, dishes, or just a bit of down time, to have to make coffee and find snacks and sit down for a chat. If I were home all day that would be quite different, or so I think.

Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in.

Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.

I feel like a literal pop in does not work for many people due to mobile phones and suburbs. Suburbs make it so you have to go at least a little out of your way to visit someone, which means you might as well call to make sure they are available before wasting your time on a detour.

Although, I see no problem with impromptu visits, I get them all the time. They just happen to call or text before coming.

Agree. Even when I was a kid, "pop-ins" were only immediate neighbors, maybe within a 3-4 house radius. Anyone farther away you'd call first, even with landlines.

These days many people don't even know the names of the people living across the street.

That works if someone isn’t frantically trying to get from point A to point B, or so overwhelmed they are trying to find some time to stop and think. That’s the challenge for most Suburban parents around here anyway.

Everyone is busy at times, but if you are always frantically trying to get from A to B or overwhelmed, that's probably an issue in its own right in need of addressing.

Of course! That’s also practically what most middle class folks with kids are in all day every day. Upper middle class too.

If not that well off, it’s usually worse.

And near as I can tell, that barely keeps their head above water, if that.

I was about to read HN now what

This is how my grandparents and their friends do it and they clearly have better communication with their friends than I do with mine.

Maybe this whole "scheduling" things was a mistake.

Meanwhile in the real world, most folks seem to have a panic attack if anyone knocks on their door. Or they have to make a phone call.

Ughh..this is not an exaggeration. I remember recently when Amazon delivered a package to my house meant for a neighbor down the street. I had time so I walked over and knocked on the door. After about a minute I saw a young lady barely pulling the window blinds apart to peek out. When she saw there was still someone there (an out of shape nerd who looks like a Best Buy worker—the opposite of intimidating) just holding a package, she let out a shriek from the depths of damnation, and basically stood there screaming until I set the package down and walked away. You could hear it from the sidewalk. People have gone la la.

I think the advent of cell phones killed the pop in, everyone can call or text now before popping in.

or just shoot a text to say hi and check in.

no need to roll up and see how your week has been, just send someone a how-do and maybe to a 5 min facetime

A good approach is for a social circle to block out social time. Saturday night, every other week or every third week seems to be the sweet spot where it's constant enough to make people not create recurring conflicts, but sparse enough that people can still make other weekend plans. Not everyone can make it every time, but between people inviting new people and a core group of regulars, you can keep it up in perpetuity.

Sure, but are you maximizing his college admissions chances via skills in carefully selected activities in order to stand out? (mostly joking, but this is how a lot of people approach scheduling these days)

I agree. You get to be really careful where you want to put ur skill points. Play time is part of the skill tree too ;)

Full scheduling of random stuff doesn't mean it would always help the children. It's the children's version of appearing busy.

A full schedule is bad for a kid. They need to learn how to keep themselves entertained, or plan their own activities, or manage their own time, and they can't do that if they get a day plan from sun up to sun down.

Kids can keep themselves entertained very easily nowadays, YouTube/Tiktok/games can suck hours away in the blink of an eye. It's not like when I was young where going outside and hanging out with friends was the most fun choice.

As a tech person I long for the days of limited choices.

In this age of extreme abundance, we have lost the ability to just daydream, people watch, etc. I’m not glamorizing being bored. I used to hate waiting for 30 mins for the bus.

Sorry this is something I lecture my kids about a lot! :-)

haha I have been maximizing the annoyance level of my parents and others by telling my kids these things:

- don’t focus on GPA, focus on actually gaining knowledge and understanding how the world works. good grades are a measure of how you understand things. they should never be the goal. I was a C student and I am more curious about things than many of my peers with fancy degrees.

- forge your own path, there is always a thousand different paths out there. College is just one.

- no replacement for hard work. don’t expect anything in life. anything worth getting, you’ll have to compete with many others to get it so learn to be a good competitor.

- college should be approached with all the tradeoffs and as any other investment. We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck. We’re the only parents in our whole social circle that aren’t saving for their college. it feels weird and isolating when that topic comes up.

- first think about the kind of life you want and then make choices to get you that life.

they’re already sick if my lectures. and they’re 10 and 5. :-)

I wish I could upvote more than once.

Assuming you’re American you are really screwing then over by not paying for college. The FAFSA assumes a parental contribution. It’s not just other parents, but the federal government and all the colleges themselves that have the expectation that you will contribute.

There’s no exemption for “I want to teach my kids financial responsibility”. If you’re high income your children will be ineligible for any financial aid and have few options for funding their own education.

There's always the Post-9/11 GI Bill. 36 months of tuition at the most expensive in-state rate in whatever state you attend school in plus Basic Allowance for Housing equal to an E5 with dependents is quite good.

The problem was they never factor in the single mom with 3 kids, she made "enough" that I qualified for less grants, but she still had 2 other kids to raise and also help put through college since we were only a couple years apart.

The FAFSA is such a crappy measuring stick for college affordability. I ended up having to make up the difference with loans, now it wouldn't be feasible.

Not at all true.

They can choose to go to very good public universities with in state tuition (often around $10-12k per year). We can sit down and discuss the tradeoffs of the degree they are getting vs the earning power of that degree. And the tradeoffs between being a commuter student and one that lives on campus. Or saving money by attending community college the first two years.

NONE of those conversations will happen if I struggle to save 200k per kid and they simply don’t understand the concept of having to pay that back somewhere. Or ever think about whether a particular degree has any real value.

This is part of the problem with just going along with the high fees and running that rat race.

I don’t have time to look up tuitions for each state, but that’s highly dependent on where you chose to live. Something that your children have no control over.

I certainly did not have a “very good public university” with $10k tuition. My state flagship (Rutgers) was over $20k per year. Other states public universities were often even more expensive, Berkeley would have cost more than any private university I was accepted to.

If you live somewhere like CA, Texas, or Michigan then more power to you, your kids should have great options. But it’s not advice that transfers. And again, the government is of the position that that 40-60k is your responsibility. I don’t agree with the way higher education is managed either but you’re not opting out of it, your just passing the costs to your kids.

Annual in-state Tuitions (not counting room/board, so roughly 2x-2.5x if you add these) for a handful of VERY good public universities:

- University of Maryland, College Park ~ $10k a year [1]

- University of California, Los Angeles ~ $15k a year [2]

- University of Pennsylvania, WOW $56k ... that's .... CRAZY for a public University.

Obviously this is not at all a good sample size but I picked public universities in populous areas in states that cover a lot of the population. And I'm picking better known ones. Someone else probably has a lot of good, statistical data on this, like the US Gov Department of Education.

1: https://academiccatalog.umd.edu/undergraduate/fees-expenses-...

2: https://admission.ucla.edu/tuition-aid/tuition-fees

3: https://srfs.upenn.edu/costs-budgeting/undergraduate-cost-at...

In school I didn't care about grades. Still went to a good college.

In college I didn't care about grades. Still graduated.

At work I don't care about promotions. I still get raises well above inflation and am doing great.

You happened to luck out by choosing a career that's in demand (whether consciously or unconsciously), and are probably pretty good at it. Otherwise your story would sound very different. I am the same way, but straddle the professional world and the artistic world (trained / educated in both), and certainly appreciate the randomness involved and how much luck was involved in the fact that I happened to be interested in tech (and had the opportunity to pursue it when I did).

I have many friends without the same opportunities and I would be struggling just as much as them if it weren't for the tech bits (and a little bit of being in the right place at the right time)

Definitely luck involved there! But also I think that as long as you have a realistic plan and are able to consistently work on it early (I started learning web dev at 8) you can mostly disregard the standard education and progression systems. I think that railroading a child through the systems without a plan is wasted effort. Not that there aren't good things to learn that way. I ended up learning a ton about art and art history thanks to my college's degree requirements.

I guess what I'm saying is you can throw a child into extracurriculars and just sort of hope the extra work makes the difference between comfort and struggling. Or you can encourage them to find hobbies and reinforce the ones that will lead to comfort and stability as my parents did.

>We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck

I've read this before from Americans, and I don't get it. In my culture if parents can pay for their kids' education, they do it. There's a time and a place to teach them financial responsability, I feel distracting them with financial concerns during their most challenging years of schooling is not it.

When I went to college (paid for by my parents), I had friends who had to work on the side to pay for rent and groceries. They barely hung by, very few had great grades since they had to split their time between work and study. One of my close friends ended up dropping out because he was burned out.

Of course this doesn't mean you should pay 50k for a degree in feminist dance therapy, you make sure you only pay for something with ROI (That's another thing I don't understand about Americans. In a country with tuition so high, how can so many pursue degrees with such awful job prospects?)

You raise interesting points.

We’ve actually discussed that a bit. We will never let them get to the point where they have to worry about eating meals, or worry that their academics have to suffer to make ends meet.

We even considered for example giving them a living allowance so they have more flexibility in picking jobs, but aren’t desperate. But it’s important to me that they understand and intelligently approach the first large financial decision of their lives.

It’s also important (to me) that my kids work during college, whether it’s waiting tables in a restaurant, or a retail job, and understand the value of money and the value of serving lots of customers (including angry customers). Those experiences never leave you. You have more empathy for someone waiting tables or taking longer or making mistakes when you’ve done it yourself.

We are pretty well off right now and our kids have a very nice life. It’s important that they learn that it isn’t the default, and that it is a result of working hard. They’re already good kids. You’re right, our job parents is not to let them hit a point of desperation. But at the same time we also want them to learn the value of hard work, juggling priorities, and having the pride of having paid your own way through college.

These are all the additional lessons outside the classroom.

When does little Johnny learn intrapersonal skills, conflict resolution skills, active listening skills, how to build and maintain friendship skills, or self-determination skills?

My sister and I have separate mothers. My mother, who I lived with, was pretty absent throughout my childhood. I never really had any monitoring on how I spent my time, for better or worse, but that reality allowed me to kind of chase interests (or ignore interests) and cultivate a lot of passion and curiosity. My sister's mother was the exact opposite. She prioritized "getting to be a mom" over my sister's time and enjoyment, so she became a Scout Leader, Soccer Coach, Ballet Coordinator, Cheer Coach etc. and had my sister join all of those activities. Every day was school from 7-whenever, straight to dance, straight to homework, straight to bed. I don't think my sister ever had more than an hour or two free for her entire childhood. The outcome is kind of wild. She's an anxiety mess, overly controlling, but also unable to really think for herself or prioritize her interests (maybe because she doesn't have a ton?), and usually just takes the path of least resistance or that she's been told to take. I feel sad for her, but I obviously was powerless to stop it.

Might be an issue with your social class? I know plenty of poorer parents whose children aren't filled with a myriad of activities because the family simply can afford to pay them, the kids simply act like kids.

Structured lessons and organized sports are not the problem, kids have been taking piano lessons and swim lessons and playing Little League baseball since forever. But it can't be exclusively that. They need unstructured free play as well.

Same thing as adults. Everyone is too busy to get together, especially after having kids.

That sucks. I used to ride the bus home after school, throw my backpack at my house, and run off to play with my buds until the sun started to go down. It was the most amazing part of my day, just being free to be a kid and DO WHATEVER. Sometimes we'd walk to the stream and pick up rocks to look for bugs and crawfish. Sometimes we'd play card games. Sometimes we'd go to the park and play "wall ball", which obviously included a painful peg to the back with a tennis ball if you failed whatever the goal of that game even was!

Anyways, point is, this fostered my interest in nature (looking for bugs), my sociability and strategy (card games), and my agility and teamwork (wall ball). This was stuff I worked hard at too, because they were my interests.

I’d hesitate to make any broad point with stuff like this. My daughter sounds like your son, she loves unstructured play. My son on the other hand is much happier with structured activities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either.

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