Enter my home on a weekday around 4 p.m., and you ll find a scene that feels ripped from a medical drama: Rushing, shouting, various equipment flying through the air. A ticking clock. Only when you squint do the differences come into view: Absolutely no one has sanitized their hands and while the stakes feel life or death, they are just... gymnastics. Albeit gymnastics that starts at 4:45 p.m, when we’re not home from school until 4:15, and is located 35 minutes from my home. You can do the math. And when you do, I think you ll understand when I say:
In this house, we heart quitting. So far, this is our quitting year.
Quitting is a relatively new passion for my family, as we ve only actually been doing things you can quit for a couple of years. There were baby times, then the pandemic and its slow return, but eventually we managed to frazzle ourselves into a classic tableau: Three kids with at least three extracurriculars to their name. For context, my kids are nine, seven and nearly five. They are young. I once envisioned myself being the kind of parent who eschewed activities altogether—Childhood is for unstructured exploration! I would say, all blissed-out, while they quietly painted rocks at my feet—I hit my limit on unstructured exploration around April 2020. When I could finally enroll my kids in teams and clubs, I did so not with the mindset of a gum-chewing, tracksuit-wearing, “my kid versus all” ambition monster, but with the mindset of someone who wanted, very much, to … drop … them … off.
So we did t-ball and baseball and basketball and flag football. Hip-hop and musical theater and ballet and tap. Animal club and book club and after-school workout club and, hatefully, formalized street parkour, which I ll come back to. Each activity had its commensurate uniform, equipment, fundraisers, and dates to remember, and the ones that were not through school came with tuitions of varying heft. For a while, it was fun. It felt like the life Covid robbed us of. But soon the novelty wore off, dinner became things flung to the backseat of the car, and I found myself wondering: How had something I came to with such a non-intense mindset become so... intense?
What I realized was: I d been confusing intensity and competition. I had checked myself for competitive tendencies before enrolling my kids in things, but I hadn t thought to examine any other types of intensity. As it turns out, I m not a snowplow parent or a tiger mom or any of the other vehicles or animals—I m a... well, I m kind of like a fairy who just chugged a Red Bull. When my children display a momentary interest in something, presto! I wave my wand and enroll you in it, instantly. One lingering look at the cover of Angelina Ballerina? I m Priming leotards. Made a painting? Page the art school! Watched a few minutes of basketball with me, likely just to shut me up? I ll be upstairs googling 10-foot hoop what if you have no driveway?
As a Red Bull fairy mom (this isn t... going to catch on, is it?), I move too quickly to actualize and formalize my children s interests. I m enabled by fast, free shipping and the ease of finding just about any kind of league from my phone. Listen: I have searched for a chanbara league for seven-year-olds. What s chanbara, you ask? It s a sword fighting technique popularized by samurai cinema, a sub-category of jidaigeki, and you wanna hear something outrageous? It s not offered for seven-year-olds in my neighborhood!
I m surprised at myself for getting in deep. In other areas of child-rearing, I ve actively tried to avoid what I think of as "on-demand childhood." I staged a self-directed summer. I sometimes let my kids only watch what s on, when it comes to TV. But I have a weak spot when it comes to passion—perhaps because my childhood revolved around mine. What I m doing right now is legit what I was doing at six years old: tapping out stories in my room while outside my window my brothers practiced baseball, which they would both go on to play at collegiate and professional levels. I think I m afraid that if I don t expose my children to anything they raise an eyebrow at, they might miss their actual... lives.
But there s something I don t consider, when I give in to this fear: My passion grew out of limited options. My parents didn t fly to find me a "little-authors" club the first time I wrote *the end—*they hauled an old Brother typewriter up from the basement and brought home discarded paper from work. (My first works were published on the backs of hundreds of purple ads for a nursing home.) It was low-risk, low-reward; that s where, as a parent, I ve gone wrong. I m not exposing my kids to arts and sciences and sports; they do that themselves, when they tinker at home or drop into a one-day event. With clubs and teams—especially the ones that last for a full school year—I am plunging them into things instead of letting them choose when to dive.
It s also true that activities these days aren t necessarily set up for sampling; my daughter s gymnastics has no season. Nor does my younger son s rolling parkour gym, a $200/month endeavor that, to my eyes, consists mainly of the "coaches," none of whom look a day over twenty, chasing my son with a pool noodle. A few weeks ago, I watched the noodle action and thought, Jesus Christ. I m halving my lunchmeat orders for budget concerns, but I m paying for this? A noodle? I felt spiritually exhausted and financially stressed, and I had no one to blame but myself. We d only ended up here because I told my son he had to pick some activity (why?), and he said "chanbara." As I write this, it’s becoming clear: He probably only said that because he knew it wouldn’t happen. And I responded by bargaining him down to parkour. Why? What would have been so bad about driving nowhere and letting him build LEGO in his room?
"Do you actually like parkour?" I asked him, after the session. We were on our 30-minute drive home. I had just watched him be passed over for a paper certifying he can jump on two feet, which he s been able to do since about eighteen months old. The coach said he was getting close, but not quite there. Probably just another four hundred dollars or so! I thought I heard him add.
"I mean, I like it," my son said, in that way kids do when they mean: Who knows?
So we re quitting. This is the new rule: If we just want to try something, we re just trying it. If it s a team activity or has a set session, we ll stay til the end. But if it s a rolling pool-noodle club devoid of teammates to let down? We can Irish exit whenever we want. We’re already making good on this policy. Just ask gymnastics. My daughter started her lessons bushy-eyed in September and was sick to death of them by Christmas, which makes perfect sense: That s a good chunk of her life! Proportional to grownups, that’s a whole job stint on LinkedIn. But when I went to give notice at the front desk of the gym, people averted their eyes, embarrassed for me.
"She ll have to finish out the month," the manager sighed. She was wearing a headset.
Or what? I felt like saying. No Olympic team?
I said fine, we d finish out the month; after all, we’d paid for it. My daughter, who was not consulted on the arrangement, spent the next session in a state of nonviolent protest, being pushed down ramps and across mats like a sticky ham in a meat plant. She quiet-quit gymnastics, and good for her. It was hard to watch, but edifying, too: Next time I’m tempted to plunge my kids into something, I’ll think of the ham. And the noodle. I’ll try to keep my thumb from clicking that I’m Interested! button and tell myself: Wait til they are.