Comment by AuryGlenz
2 days ago
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
I was a HS teacher for about a decade. The demands on kids and families around youth sports (especially private/club leagues) is out of control. I had students, 14/15-years-old, going to their school team practice then club team practice, not getting home until past 9 pm every night. Families from three states away would enroll their kids in my school half of the year to play on the hockey team (staying with local sponsor family). Tournaments across the Midwest most weekends. These weren’t even future D1 athletes.
I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer. It didn’t used to be like this.
>The demands on kids and families
I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative? Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't relate to it.
We only have a 3 year old and a baby, but my wife and I have already argued a bit about this. She's all in on the sports train - it was a large part of her life growing up for her and her siblings. I, on the other hand, did a lot with my free time as a kid/teen.
I think part of the problem is that for people like her they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of sports, but they don't realize just how much the time commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk cost fallacy.
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From talking to many parents they want to give them activities so their kids aren’t bored or sitting inside on their phones all day. Sports is one of those things and lets them also be with other kids.
The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones and the only rule was “be home before sundown”. Kids now have way too many distractions and structure and are never given the ability to explore their own world on their own. It’s been manufactured for them.
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My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so, these are and will be his peers and it starts as major FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's also, they're young, we want to expose them to everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc). So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years. It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time, they'll be club/select league aged and people will faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they won't make the cut against kids that have been playing non-stop since they were <6.
It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
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I think a lot of families are also optimizing for university admissions. Strong athletes often have an easier time with admissions (assuming they're also good academically).
I remember having an interview with an engineering professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and one of the first things he asked me was what team sports I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably made my college applications weaker.
This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse.
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check out this article (gift link) from yesterday about private equity in youth sports
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-pri...
> For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
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I noticed a lot of (upper-middleclass) parents (moms) fear that any none organized activity results 100% in their kid sitting on their phone/computer (they are not wrong on this point).
Rather than restricting screen time, admittedly not an easy battle (stating how it is, not how it should be), they outsource/circumvent that through organized activity.
Then there is the "competitive" nature. Can't have our kid just goofing around, (and I know the next bit is a bit exagerated and sarcastic, but often not untrue), I need the wins for my fantastic parent Facebook posts.
Lastly, non organized means unsupervised. Parents, I think especially in the US, are (thaught to) regard the world as a dangerzone for kids. Hanging around without oversight or protection, it is just time before they will surely get abducted, mugged, raped or murdered. Is this pure paranoia, or a media fueled self fulfilling prophecy? Can you blame parents for being overly protective for their (often only) child?
The pressure to get into college starts before birth. A 4.0 grade average isn’t good enough anymore.
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From what I observed about these club hockey players I saw growing up, mainly the kid loves it and made it into their identity. So the parents are probably feeling pretty forced into paying for it. That being said every family I knew doing this sort of thing could easily pay for it.
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Narcissist parents competing with other narcissist parents to be the best parents in the universe. Social media caters to their twisted world view where everyone is living a polished life of perfection so why not them and their perfect high-success family.
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You can't even make a high school team anymore unless you start playing club & private at a very young age. Lots of primary public schools (K-6/7) which is where I learned sports and got good at a few, often don't have sports teams anymore, or if they do it's a few passionate people with limited coaching and sports skills who just want to provide any opportunity.
The natural solution would be to increase the number of teams to also accommodate people who are interested but don’t want to or are unable to dedicate their life to sports. But if schools need to cut costs, it’s tough to do.
It’s a common trend in many domains: universities, housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means people need to gear up to fight over the things that still exist.
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I graduated high school in 2001. During the summer before my freshman year, I signed up for the soccer team. We trained 6-hours/day, 6-days/week during the summer. I thought it was grueling, but I also understood that was part of what made our team one of the top contenders in the state. Even still, we were very much in the shadow of the middling football team.
But I put up with it. Summer in the rural south in the 1990s could be a deeply boring affair, without something to occupy us. I was easily in the best shape of my life at the end of the summer (I could run 11-miles in about an hour without stopping). But then, after school started, I met someone else who enjoyed the same obscure punk music I did, and who owned a drum set, and quickly decided I wanted to play music much more than spend all day every day on the soccer field. So before the first game, I quit the team. I think they went on to do pretty well. My band was terrible, but we had fun.
I guess my point is that—in 1997, at a rural school in the south that very much cared mostly about the football team, playing soccer in high school was still a full-time commitment.
My son goes to what I call "the sports High School" but he is not particularly athletically gifted, which has caused a lot of friction. I personally believe to my very core that sports are over-emphasized and that we are raising a whole generation of idiots who won't be able to do math or anything particularly useful except guzzle booze and sell used cars to people.
Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can be a kid."
Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.
Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.
Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
The recent NCAA changes vis a vis roster limits is only making this worse. Want to be a collegiate athlete? You better be ELITE. Walk-ons are a thing of the past. As such, kids with those dreams (or overly involved parents) are pouring their lives into their sport(s).
the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely due to the fact that if kids are not “somewhere” they will be watching tv or staring at some f’ing screen cause that’s what other kids are doing who are also home. I have a large network of friends with kids and every single one of them over-schedules every f’ing thing due to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better of at ____ than at home alone)
I swear the more Xanax people get, the more they overschedule themselves and their kids. I think existence of anxiety prevents people from overexerting themselves, and pharmacologically removing it just lets people, and the children they live through, take on more responsibilities, beyond what is healthy.
I think drugs like Xanax are playing a huge, but under-the-radar type of role in all kind of social contagions that we are witnessing. Every time someone does something crazy or even just a bit "off" I ask myself: "Is that person on drugs?" The answer is likely "yes!" Not illegal drugs, per se, but still.
I don't overschedule my kids. It's ridiculous what I see going on and I'm not friends with those "driven" parents whose motivations I simply can't fathom. There is a total lack of respect for basic academics amongst them, too.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'm on drugs precisely to stop me from doing crazy things.
I graduated in '05 and some of stuff my contemporaries were doing then wrt sports and trying to get to the next level was already crazy (playing for the school and doing travel ball as well, so many practices/camps/extra workout sessions) and don't get me started on the craziness wrestlers had to go through. I've heard it's even worse now as it has become more competitive to get to the next level, whether that's trying to get a good NIL deal or trying to play professionally
I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity in what were stable middle class environments leads to seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School work like first year investment bankers, leading to high rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605329
Probably just look at Korea tbh
Demands of sports was identified as a major factor harming the ability to raise kids in Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney.
There has to be some selection bias here. Maybe a certain class of school / student?
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