Parents who pulled back on youth sports and activities explain how they did it.

During the darkest depths of COVID, my husband and I had the same conversation over and over. I predicted the iron grip of Activities Culture would loosen after lockdown, and parents would become more intentional about protecting family time against overscheduling. My husband took the other side, hard. “Everything will snap right back like a rubber band,” he said, and four years later, there’s no question about who was right. Things didn’t just “snap back.” It’s like we all got launched out of a catapult, as the activity/sports industrial complex roared back into life, sweeping away game nights and family grocery shopping in its inexorable gears. If anything, logistics feel more stressful now than they did before COVID, as families play catch-up after the isolation of the pandemic. But something has to give.

No parent I have spoken to says this is the system they want, where families split up on the weekends to shuttle kids to different games and orchestrate a complex ballet of carpools to activities and practices after school during the week. Instead, it feels more like a runaway train no one knows how to get off. But lately, I have noticed a change. They may be the tip of the spear, or just a small group of outliers, but some families are simply saying: Enough.

The youth sports industry in the U.S. has exploded over the past two decades, becoming an economic juggernaut now worth at least $19 billion—larger than the annual revenues of the NBA or NFL. Club and travel teams are economically incentivized to start recruiting kids younger, and according to a 2022 study by the Aspen Institute, families spend an average of $883 for every sport a child plays. More than 50 percent of children play sports in the U.S., and 40 percent of those kids play one sport year-round. As Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids Sports—and Why it Matters, has reported, having a competitive athlete in the family can cause strain on parents and siblings, as well as the athlete. Access to sports has also become an equity issue, as expensive club teams and travel sports replace more affordable and less time-intensive recreational leagues, not to mention the unstructured, child-led pickup games kids used to play. But the problem here is not just about sports, qua sports; it’s more about the grind. According to a study published this year in the Economics of Education Review, overscheduling extracurriculars of all kinds is linked to depression and anxiety in youth.

Alongside of this, the college counseling industry—valued at $2.9 billion—is amplifying the message from colleges that teens must “brand” themselves starting freshman year of high school, making the stakes even higher when it comes to extracurriculars. As Sarah Bernstein, a college essay advisor, wrote in a cracklingly funny and extremely depressing recent essay in the New York Times, the idea that teenagers can have the space to try new things—or simply do less—in high school starts to feel like a risky bet to parents.

Gail Cornwall, a San Francisco–based journalist who focuses on education and child development, talked to me about the dilemma parents face. Cornwall, who is raising five children in a blended family, is one of the people I mean when I say that I’ve noticed that some parents are pulling back. She has been intentional about protecting her family’s time—choosing activities that are walkable or accessible via public transportation; giving her kids unstructured afternoons at the playground; and supporting her two high school–age girls when they decided to quit their respective sports this spring.

The challenge is this approach flies in the face of so many of the messages parents are getting about admissions to selective colleges. At a recent event hosted by her 17-year-old daughter’s high school, “the college counselor was talking about kids’ essays, saying that teens should tie their passions and interests to what they want to major in,” she says. “To be pre-med, these teens are expected to already have volunteered in a hospital or a lab. It’s all part of the professionalization of adolescence.” While Cornwall acknowledges that so much of the résumé-building that now starts (in some places) in elementary school is driven by parental anxiety, she adds: “We also aren’t making this shit up.”

“You hear that your child not only has to have perfect grades and perfect scores, but also has to be ‘pointy,’ to stick out in an extremely specialized way,” one Bay Area mother, who has a daughter in college and a son who will apply next year, told me. “Everyone is gunning for these super selective colleges, but the truth is, 80 to 90 percent of these kids are not going to get in. If families knew that from the start, we could spare ourselves a whole lot of weekend tournaments and after-school carpools to this or that, and instead just have a much nicer eight years together before our kids leave home.” Her son has drafted a very pragmatic list of colleges to apply to, and they are trying not to get as sucked in this time.

It’s fashionable now to blame overanxious, achievement-focused parents for everything, but our college admissions process has become so brutally uncertain, the stress of it reverberates well beyond ride-or-die Ivy Leaguers. And when you look at the messaging parents receive from high school and college counselors, the overscheduling obsession—with its focus on sports specialization or creating a musical, artistic, or philanthropic phenom—starts to make sense. Maybe, as Cornwall explains, parents are making rational decisions based on the ridiculous fact that a teenager who has started their own nonprofit is more attractive to a group of hypothetical admissions officers than a kid who has been babysitting regularly since they were 14. (Personally, I’d take the babysitter 10 times out of 10.)

But just like we may finally be waking up from our long slumber about how godawful phones and social media are for kids, families are starting to push back against overscheduling. Two mothers I know recently pulled their elementary school–aged kids from club sports, one holding fast to her decision even when the coach warned her not to “close any doors.” When Cornwall posted on X about how proud she was of her daughters for quitting their high school sports teams—a sentence that has been uttered by no one in America, ever—she received support, not the usual “bad mother” vitriol. Small groups of parents are banding together to create spaces for unstructured free play. To paraphrase Matilda, the scent of rebellion is in the air.

Activities Culture is not, on its face, a bad thing—we all know art and music and running around outside are positive for kids. But you don’t need a whole bunch of classes to do that when kids are young. When kids are just getting started with sports and lessons, many people sign up because of social pressure among parents, and the fact that a family life full of extracurriculars feels like the norm. Even when stress over college is years in the future, there is still a very palpable sense that being a “good” parent means giving your child an opportunity to take ballet, or piano, or play sports. And participation in scheduled activities can feel like it’s signaling the intensity and commitment of your parenting, and maybe even a certain position in life, given the uncomfortable fact that travel sports and extracurriculars take a ton of time and money, often shutting out less affluent families who may not have flexible work schedules. Given all of this, the first step off the treadmill might be to flock to the people who believe what you believe.

“I don’t know if it’s coincidental or if I migrate toward parents with a similar philosophy, but the parents I spend time with don’t overschedule their kids with activities,” says Jessica Gomez, a mother of a 6-year-old who lives with her family in metro Detroit. “The kids in our neighborhood are still young, so the parents watch them as they play outside, and it’s created a bond for all of us.” Gomez says her son is creative, and that having a packed schedule can hinder that. “I have felt pressure at times; I’ll see his classmates taking violin or piano lessons and think, I should get him into that. But it’s only something I’m willing to explore when another activity has ended.”

Gomez is holding the line, but that pressure is a real thing. A single mom who lives in the Boston area with her two daughters, ages 4 and 1, told me she is the only parent in her daughter’s class who doesn’t do activities, both because the logistics feel too thorny and because her daughter hasn’t asked. “Sometimes I do feel bad that we haven’t participated in ballet, ceramics, or soccer,” she says, but as a professional artist, she knows her kids are also getting a lot of stimulation at home. Another mom who works full time outside the home says, “I judge my friends for having their elementary school kids in so many activities, but also worry that they’re judging me for not doing that.”

Even for parents who resist overscheduling, it can be hard to find a middle road, because sports and activities ramp up so quickly. Having a few fellow travelers helps. Cornwall explains how she and a small group of parents in her daughter’s third-grade class all opted out of the club sports route, keeping their kids in the less-intensive rec sports track. “There’s a group of kids in her grade who are all really athletic, and the parents have kept them out of club sports so they can do rec sports together,” she says. “And the kids who aren’t as good are also playing on the team; they haven’t been boxed out.” It also allows kids to try a bunch of sports, instead of focusing on one.

But club sports are businesses that need revenue year-round, so the push to specialize starts early. “When people pressure your child to specialize at a young age, they are in the money game,” says Scott Lancaster, co-author, along with Luis Fernando Llosa and Kim John Payne, of Beyond Winning: Smart Parenting in a Toxic Sports Environment. “They’re just out for your money. It’s not in the best interest of the athletes or the teams.” Not only do the practice schedules and repetitive drills that come with club sports often result in injury and burnout, these authors explain, but early specialization crowds out time for unstructured play and exposure to other sports, which build the kind of creativity, flexibility, and skills that are essential to becoming a good athlete. (Lancaster, Llosa and Payne also founded Whole Child Sports, whose mission is to raise awareness about the challenges in youth sports and offer parents and coaches solutions.)

Payne, who also wrote the book Simplicity Parenting, argues that if you can hold off on organized sports until age 11 or 12, it allows your child “that whole learning window for creativity, resilience, negotiation, the things they learn during unstructured play.” Starting competitive sports early can interrupt the social-emotional learning development that comes from play, he explains, and they don’t even pay off the way most families think they will. “For children who start competitive sports before age 13, the dropout rate is 70 percent,” says Lancaster.

That doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t touch a ball before middle school. Before his five children were in middle school, Llosa, his wife Mary, and other parents formed a loose group of seven or eight families who let their kids play sports together in Manhattan’s Central Park, with no formal coaching or supervision, “just a parent on a bench keeping an eye out.” While it was a little extra work on the front end, “it gave the kids the ability and opportunity to argue, to figure out how the games were going to work.” While I am loath to suggest more work for overburdened parents, Payne argues that this idea of a rotating neighborhood play group is a lot more time-efficient than schlepping kids to endless games and practices.

Perhaps this is the time to mention that I loved sports growing up, and played lots of them. I also loved singing, piano, and writing a novel in No. 2 pencil that borrowed heavily from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Learning to be on a team, exposure to the arts—these are great things for kids. The issue is with how early extracurriculars ramp up, crowding out the downtime needed for free play and creativity, and how quickly they are packaged as résumé-builders instead of messy, joyful exploration. One mother of two who lives in Westchester, New York, told me that while she likes the rigor, consistency, and physical outlet that travel sports provide for her kids, “they say creativity requires downtime to let your mind wander, and that has been in very short supply for years.”

But another challenge for parents these days is that technology has transformed that precious downtime. When my brother and I were home as kids, we were reading and making couch-pillow forts; we weren’t scrolling TikTok. Screens have basically killed the childhood art of puttering, and forced a starker calculus upon parents, who would rather have their kids in a structured activity than glued to their phones or iPads. “There’s a wave building up of parents who are prizing their children away from screens and sticking them right in sports,” says Payne. “But there’s middle ground there—scrimmages, sandlot games, other activities. I’m trying to encourage more parents not to go directly to competitive sports.”

There are other reasons it’s so hard to jump off the train once it starts moving. “I hate to say bragging rights matter,” the mom who lives in Westchester told me. “But the social status hierarchies of middle school are a real thing. As much as I want to pretend I don’t care, I know it means a lot to my kids to have the travel sports anointment.”

Leena Feeley, a junior who attends high school in San Francisco (and one of the daughters in Gail Cornwall’s blended family), also notes how important sports are at her school, saying how proud she was when she made varsity softball her sophomore year. “But I didn’t enjoy it anymore because I’d been playing essentially my whole life,” she says. “I was under the impression that I needed to keep playing for colleges, and that was the only thing keeping me there, until I thought, Why am I 16 and committing hours and hours to something I don’t enjoy?” She quit this year and is now spending some of that freed up time writing, getting her homework done earlier, and focusing on a service club she leads at school.

It’s a brave choice, the kind I would hope colleges actually want to see. “You really do feel the pressure to specialize from college,” says Feeley. “There are kids who aren’t really applying as themselves, they’re just applying with what they’ve forced themselves to commit to. It’s not really who they are.”

I hope when it’s time for my kids to start applying to high school and college, I can remember this. Because while we are drowning in logistics like every other American family, compared to other parents I know, we aren’t even that busy! No travel athletes live in our house. My 9-year-old daughter flat-out told me after kindergarten that soccer cut too much into her leisure time, and my 11-year-old son quit after first grade, saying it was too competitive. Four years later, he’s dipping a toe back in with Little League, and enjoying it. We are parents on the outer rim of youth sports. And while there’s a cost to that—we aren’t part of the playdates and plans made on the sidelines; we don’t experience the camaraderie of a team—it’s made space for other things.

My kids play the ukulele and the drums. They make stop-motion movies with elaborate plots. They walk the dog. My daughter participates in a theater program run by a director who’s a cross between Greta Gerwig and a magician. Her plays roll crisply off the assembly line every few months and yet require only weekly rehearsals, not the four- or five-day-a-week commitments that are now common. And sure, sometimes the wizard forgets his lines, or the head of a dummy flies off during an action sequence, but the show goes on, all the more delightful for not being perfect and professionalized.

It’s sad, but as I was reporting this piece, I couldn’t help wondering if one of the reasons my daughter loves acting so much is because her theater program is a nonprofit. I know, after years of covering parenting and education, that I should not feel so surprised and angry that so much of the Age of Overscheduling is powered by naked economics, but I am. Parents want to do their best by their kids, and we have an entire cottage industry that’s profiting off of that, while leaving families who can’t afford travel sports or college consultants out in the cold.

But we do not have to buy in. We do not have to buy in! I understand that no parent wants to feel like they are choosing between their family’s well-being and the playoff games and dance recitals that have become the hallmarks of childhood in America, let alone their kid’s shot at a good college. But there are good schools, like Arizona State University, that have gone the other direction, accepting almost all applicants. And given the risk of burnout and anxiety that overscheduling brings, the formula that’s being relentlessly peddled to parents isn’t even, arguably, the formula that “works” to produce a thriving kid.

So I’m going to suggest a radical idea. Do what’s truly going to make your family happy. If that is competitive sports, like it is for many families I know, that is wonderful. If you are a family who wants to keep to the middle road of rec sports or sandlot games, fight for that as long as you can. And if your kid wants to sit home making houses for stuffed mice out of cardboard, that’s fantastic too. There’s a college essay in there somewhere.