Kids’ competitive activities lead to debt for parents
lendingtree.com
lendingtree.com
You could also write an article saying home cooked meals lead to debt for 79% of parents with the same mailing list.
Less likely oddball theory: maybe they have some relationship with the author or subject, don’t want to mess it up by publicly criticizing under their own name. Or they’re notable enough that people care what they say and they don’t like the loss of freedom that entails.
The comment makes a compelling point and just relies on the linked page as a source, it doesn’t skirt any rules, so the reputation of the commenter is not that important.
I pay a lot in taxes for education (and activities). I live in a state where it’s a constitutional obligation to provide an education and yet, schools aren’t educating student any better today than back then. And, they seem to be doing less overall. A someone who did volunteer teaching for 4 years I know there are wonderful people involved, but it just doesn’t seem to be functioning well overall.
It’s not a great situation for kids or parents today.
This is wild.
Common sense should tell you getting drafted is a ridiculous thing to bank on and a quick google will tell you "Fewer than 2 percent of high school student-athletes are offered athletic scholarships"[0]
0 - https://www.ncsasports.org/recruiting/how-to-get-recruited/s...
If your athletic focus comes at the cost of poor academic performance, that’s a disaster. Sure, you can find a university that doesn’t care about whether you’re learning anything in class, but you’re probably going to struggle after you graduate.
I think risky territory is to have children that are good enough to be almost professional athletes but not so bad that they just play socially or drop out. There are a fair few competent athletes who defer or never study because they get training roles that chew up a few vital underpaid years, and then leave them with a "I didn't make it" mindset afterwards. Professional? Great. Play, then leverage the contacts to move into a new career. Social? Great. Fitness and fun, while you're able to study/work with your peers.
Reminds me a tiny bit of the Silver medal in team sports. 3v4 play and the Bronze winners end on a high. 1v2 play, and the Silver medallists finish on a low.
So what causes the debt? The expensive activities for the kids? The new car? The big house? The latest tech gadgets? You could point at any one of these to be the cause of the debt, but the reality is simply overspending.
Maybe there is a small portion of parents you get in debt for their kids activity because it is an absolute priority and they already did everything they could have done to reduce spending elsewhere, but it is certainly not 8/10.
In my region travel teams for all sports are out of control. So long as you're willing to pay, your not-really-talented kid can play. And if your kid can't make the original travel team, or the one after that, or the one after that, someone is happy to fund their boat by creating another team.
Now, having coached a number of seasons, and having played sports at a high level in my youth, I can tell you that if your child is playing one season of rec per year, or honestly, not doing competitive sports, there’s no room to stand out at the HS level, and be considered for a college scholarship.
Now, I didn’t receive a college scholarship for athletics, but I’m certain being a 4y letterman and 2y captain and nominal valedictorian all played a part in my college acceptance letters, and significant reduction of post-collegiate debt at a tier-1 school.
I also had peers who didn’t do club sports in their HS sport until HS (i.e. switching from baseball to swimming) and they were granted scholarships.
The big point being: if you think sports are important (totally subjective and personal; I’m not going to argue for or against), you need to pursue club sports and move beyond rec.
Another (bonus) point: there’s tons of grift in club sports. I can totally see how someone would end up in debt, especially with multiple kids. And, I deeply sympathize with them, and hope that I’d be savvy enough to not get caught up in the game.
I did youth soccer in an expensive city as a kid (close to 20 years ago now), and I think my shorts and jersey were $30 (and that was for the fancy, custom team one). Double that for inflation now and you still have $40 left over, although I don't think my parents had to pay for anything else (since it was a public field and a volunteer-run league).
I had early kids in lots of activities 20+ years ago. I did not do the same for my later kids because most everything we found was massively more expensive.
Talking to parents who were involved, I learned a lot about how things changed. Modern activities really weren't the same offerings we had had.
What was informal had become formal. Activities required a much larger time commitment. Volunteers had become professionals. Coaching was a world more serious. Transportation was formalized. Things like shared gear seemed to have gone away. Even the designed uniforms where more expensive than coverings we had bought.
It had become cheaper for my younger kids to visit Belize and Alaska than to compete.
Yeah seriously. The final yearly cost of for-profit leagues easily runs into the thousands.
One off summer programs, subsidized by orgs like the Y, are often a lot more affordable.
My desire to stay indoors and code/game all day was at its peak when that was my only option for socializing besides being dragged around on long drives to see places more interesting to my parents. The most I was allowed to do otherwise was going to the movies with vetted friends for high school graduation.
In comparison, for a few years (in another country) I had the freedom to go relatively far myself to hang out unsupervised with friends. The result was that I typically spent more time outside and participated of my own interest in all sorts of events (public speaking etc).
This also translated to other hobbies, when I had the freedom to choose my routine, I had all sorts of other hobbies like drawing, when this was taken away, all I ever focused on was instant gratification (or problems I could keep in my head) because I couldn't rely on being able to plan or prioritize my day. This did a lot of damage and I've only recently recovered nearly a decade later.
Now, if my parents had put aside the "kids just want to play games/watch TV all day" belief and paid attention to what I was trying to learn and what I was interested in, they might've saved me a lot of frustration AND helped my development by enrolling me in extra classes about the things I was interested in instead of the things they were interested in.
These kind of comments always seem to say more about the writer than the subject. I loved computers and videogames growing up, I was the nerdiest kid in the class. But I also liked cycling, hiking in woods, reading, and a bunch of other things.
Anecdotally, I did sit around and play videogames (namely PC) 16 hours a day and became pretty good at computers.
I feel like this was the normal track for my Internet friends and I in the 90s. We've sold two startups pursuing the dream of making video games - which of course that dream came from playing video games all the time as kids. Though I'm doubtful if that particular path will translate well today, or especially over the next decade. Maybe it didn't translate well from the 90s either, but sure feels like it did. (And now in our 40s we still haven't made a single video game!)
I'm also dubious as to whether competitive extracurricular activities will make a difference. This was the _thing_ in high school from guidance counselors - you must must must must be in a bunch of extracurricular activities so you can write them down on your college application or you will never get to attend a good college!
Gotta start early though.
Not all of them played instruments in youth or had formal training. And if you have a bad experience you may not want to continue. I wouldn't hold that against anyone.
But it's not unheard of among band geeks to play in adult hood.
Ugh, on a related note, I'm a bad friend because I haven't kept in touch with them for a long time. Good fucking people.
Similar ecosystems around music, ancient languages, math, or anything else seem rare or non-existent. So you may have to build the whole pathway yourself every night after you get home from work and get the kids to bed.
I don't think so. I'd agree there's lots of overlap between families in for-profit league participation and university-affording families.
But if the kid's family is in debt over league participation, that kid's college prospects are a lot slimmer, if they exist at all.
I'm not sure what it says about Americans. If anything, I would wager that spending on tutoring is correlated with spending on sports.
We were deep into a trend and it increasingly divided families who could afford extracurriculars from those who can't.
The apparent solution? Adding financing to that formula. In retrospect, it just heaps cruelty upon misfortune.