Like any instinctive conservative, I wanted to give my children the kind of childhood I had. I had all the rudiments of what is now wistfully called a “free-range childhood.” Well, sometimes I had them by default. My single mother worked hard in her job at IBM, and would be late some nights. My father was estranged from us, and lived across an ocean. My grandmother, who watched me in the afternoons, gave me the same kinds of instructions she gave her own kids in that very same house: “Come back when the street lights turn on.” In the late 1980s, the neighborhood kids organized games among ourselves. There was a park around which all the homes in my neighborhood were encircled, with trees and shrubs that could serve as the outlines of a baseball diamond.
By eight years old, I was quite independent. I found an abandoned bicycle, and claimed it for myself. I learned to walk to my parochial school, over a mile away, including some slightly harrowing bits like passing through the graffiti-filled underpass of the Garden State Parkway. I mastered the public bus schedule, so that I could join the basketball team and get home without too much of the weather on me. By ten years old, I had the role of altar boy in my church. That sometimes meant getting myself to my parish to serve 7 AM daily masses for stints of half a week at a time. I showed up, even if school had been closed for a snow day. And I survived injuries and scrapes. A fifth grader tripped me on the ice, sending me to the hospital with a concussion. A drug addict running toward me on the street while I was on one of my morning walks to school punched me in the head right in front of the video arcade, and then kept running. A few days later, I told on him to the local cop assigned to run the D.A.R.E. program at my school. I just ended up wasting hours looking at photographs of local perps in the police station.
By the time I was twelve years old, after a move to the exurbs in Putnam County, NY, my grandmother was passing into occasional dementia episodes. I began cooking dinners for her, even for my mother as she arrived home. Soon I would start working jobs after school, managing my own money, my own free time. I befriended kids who were old enough to drive me around.
By the time I grew up, I had learned to appreciate the many, many unscheduled hours of boredom in my childhood home. I learned to wander through my own mind in them. They prompted me to become an avid reader and serial collector of self-directed passions and hobbies, including writing. My friend Nic had a talent for drawing emerge at that same tender age, and it’s the basis of his vocation in fashion now. I think something about the independence I felt at a young age made me hard to intimidate as I grew up. I wasn’t afraid of new places. I was quick to make friends of strangers when we went on vacation. When I became a young political reporter and writer, I realized I had no fear whatsoever approaching the great and the good. I could speak to a former President of the United States as easily as I spoke to the man at my deli counter.
So I’m primed to feel guilty that my wife and I are doing so much to make our children’s lives so much unlike the ones we had.
They have very little of casual neighborhood play or long, boring afternoons after school. I’ve come across and remain convicted by sermons delivered by clergymen against overscheduling kids or making an idol of their activities. I’m stricken when I read my peers, like Timothy P. Carney, make the case against the Travel Team trap and its associate ills, whether in dance or theater. This “achievement-oriented” parenting robs kids of time they need to develop their own minds and spirits.
Carney fingers “overly ambitious parenting” as one of the reasons why our culture is unfriendly to families and why fertility rates are low. It stresses parents out to be crossing state lines for dance competitions and lacrosse tournaments. Being surrounded by parents and children who invest so much time and money in their avocations makes them seem high stakes before the kids are ten years old:
The Travel Team Trap is easy for any parent to fall into. One need not be an achievement-obsessed parent or a dad living vicariously through his son in order to get caught up in overcompetitive youth sports. What’s so pernicious about this system is how it drags in the unwilling and unsuspecting, which then creates more momentum for the system. Like every factor in our national parenting headache, it’s self-perpetuating.
I’ve seen this all myself. I’ve seen the overtaxed schedules, the harried parents. I’ve allowed my daughter to become a full-on “dance kid.” I’ve experienced the stress of managing two young brothers at her “nationals” dance competition. Last year, after another insanely long and rather expensive weekend in a hotel, my daughter’s dance awards ceremony stretched into half-time of the Super Bowl on Sunday night. We drove her home late and exhausted that night, and delivered her exhausted to school the next morning.
My son only started baseball this last year, but already I surprised myself with how I mourned when he didn’t make the travel team on his first tryout. I did so even though another local father assured me that the whole tryout was a stitch up, since the team had enough players from the year previous.
The lifestyle of the Highly Committed Kid is a strain on kids and parents both. I would feel exposed and ashamed if I confessed to my readers just how many hours a week my daughter is at the dance studio. It involves multiple hours on four different school days and a significant Saturday morning commitment. I’d feel worse if I quoted to you the price of so much participation. I can only say in our defense that we get a discount on it because my wife spends still more hours as a volunteer there. I have to admit that the Highly Committed Kid life disrupts things that conservative parents hold dear; nightly family dinners and occasionally even Sunday worship.
Carney is right that there are costs to this burgeoning lifestyle, but he doesn’t explain why this system has momentum or how something that is so stressful and difficult nevertheless draws in “the unwilling and unsuspecting.”
So I will. Because, on reflection, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Before coming to the real reasons we’ve embraced the Highly Committed Kid lifestyle, we should be honest about free-range childhoods. When my peers and I escaped parental supervision, we sometimes did very stupid, immoral, even criminal things. Stealing from the corner shop. Snatching pornography from some father’s stash. Trying to throw acorns into open windows of cars passing by at speed. We got away with a lot.
And my own childhood had bursts of high commitment that I remember fondly, namely when I joined the ranks of the theater kids. In my freshman year of high school, I did a demanding local production of Elizabeth Swados’s Runaways, and followed it up with a role in our school’s musical. Each demanded several hours of rehearsal each weekday for weeks at a time. This was also the first time I experienced true enterprise-like conditions where you would dare not miss a single day unless feverishly ill and vomiting. Even 30 years later, I’m still close with several of the friends I made in these shows.
There are also some changes to our world that require more parental intervention to recreate the conditions of a supposed free-range childhood. Jonathan Haidt encourages parents to give children the gift of boredom. My mother didn’t have to do anything other than live her life to do that. The only TV programming that appealed to me as a child was broadcast in the very first hour after I returned home from school at 3 PM., Tiny Toons and Batman. After that, the TV belonged to the adults. Now TV comes via digital streaming. My kids figured out how to binge-watch Octonauts by age four. I spent a weekend learning to administrate a home internet server just to block content I don’t like from them.
We get more boredom into their lives by overscheduling them than underscheduling them—the car rides, the long lines at conventions, the limits of content in hotels.
When someone first asked me to justify why I’m putting my family through these considerable costs and stresses, I had a couple of clever-dick responses. The first was that it was reparative after the COVID shutdowns, which in New York were peculiarly bad. My kids used to be deficient in socializing. Now I was giving them a double or triple dose.
Another good-enough-but-false answer was that I want my children to experience excellence in an age of mediocrity. The schools are only so demanding. They’re never going to push your kids to their limits. In dance, the best girls get to do stunts and solos that are denied to their peers. In baseball, there is a real emphasis on excellence in my town. Some former Yankees players invest money here. Two kids who came up through the local recreational and travel programs have become MLB players in the last five years. One was a number one draft pick.
But here’s the real reason: The travel team dads and the dance moms are the secret high-trust society hiding within suburbs that have lost the habits of neighborliness.
My kids can’t have my childhood because the culture of our neighbors is nothing like the one I grew up in. In Halcyon Park in the 1980s, I knew the names of every single neighbor several houses in every direction, and I could and did call on them regularly. If I was locked out of my house, there was no question about their letting me in to have a caramel candy and sit until my people got home. A pair of old ladies living two doors down from us drove me to school each morning for two years. They were happy to help.
The “unsupervised games” of my childhood were in truth surveilled by old Italian-American ladies watching us from their windows. They were ready to assign blame if you broke a window, scold you if someone got their shoes thrown up on an electrical wire, and douse a skinned knee in hydrogen peroxide if some kid started wailing. My neighborhood was ethnically mixed, Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, with a few Filipinos. But almost all of us attended that same Catholic parish where I served as an altar boy. On those days when I walked to school or church, frequently those neighbors stopped their cars and offered to give me a ride. Now I suspect if my child were in the same position, our neighbors would call the police or child services.
I moved my children into their neighborhood three weeks before lockdowns started. At first I thought our neighbors’ hesitance was about fear of the virus. It turned out a group of existing residents had thoroughly Googled us, and discovered my career in writing about politics. This led to gestures of hostility and conspiracies. At one point I was falsely blamed in their secret group chat for circulating a pro-police memo in neighborhood mailboxes. This led to a rash of neighbors putting up Black Lives Matters signs for the purpose of annoying me, though I remained entirely unaware of the matter for over a year, until someone put a threatening note in my mailbox alluding to the event. We didn’t realize the extent of the problem until the Red Scare–listening “Antifa mom” next door confessed to us and befriended us. She moved out shortly thereafter.
Although our situation was in some ways sui generis, the loss of trust in suburban neighborhoods is general, and political polarization is part of the cause. Anyone following the parenting-trend literature now knows that sleepovers, so common in my childhood, are just gone. Parents simply don’t trust other households. Will they remember his peanut allergy? Do they have porn blockers on their internet? Do they have guns in the house? Do we agree about trans issues?
We felt alienated from our own neighborhood until my daughter became a dance kid. Time spent at the studio, and in the shared frustrations of the high-commitment life, revealed to us who our neighbors really were. We discovered at the studio two families who lived just one block away, and one of the dads, like me, was getting into golf. The other dad coaches travel baseball and has a boy who is willing to teach my younger sons a thing or two. It was through high-commitment kids that we finally found the neighborhood houses to call on, except we rarely had to, because the girls were at the studio anyway.
In my childhood neighborhood, my grandmother was ready to make coffee and split an Entenmann’s cake with any “company” that might happen by. The neighborhood supplied friendships. Now our close friendships among peers come from precisely two places; our highly traditionalist Catholic parish, which is almost half commuters, and the travel team dads and dance moms. Instead of Entenmann’s cake, now it is the group-text chat and an offer to pick up Dunkin’ Donuts.
Sharing the culture of high-commitment kids means we understand each other’s burdens and consequently are inclined to help each other. My daughter now has friends whose houses she can go to from the school bus and whose mothers will ferry her around when we can’t. And we fill in our part too.
Are we just higher-net-worth parents robbing from the commons? Sometimes it at least facially looks like the Organization Kids are stealing from the public weal of the less committed. The travel baseball team has immaculate fields, maintained by one of several landscape-company-owning dads who have sons on the team. The local recreational baseball field is a disaster, producing turned-over ankles and bad baseball hops that bounce into kids’ faces.
But, in general, the highly committed parents aren’t neglecting the commons; we’re the ones keeping them up, rescuing them from the mismanagement of purely public institutions. As in most places, the travel teams here require their players to join the local recreational little league. The older travel team players are often instructors. It’s the high-commitment families we know from travel ball that make the most noise to improve the fields and facilities. In fact, if these families were liberated to take action on their own, it would already be done. The landscaper and contractor dads are champing at the bit to pitch in. But the impenetrable dispute between the town recreation center and their hired greensman continues.
Yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, I wish we had two more nights a week when everyone could eat family dinner at the same time. But in the present circumstances, I would no more give up the Highly Committed Kid lifestyle than would a South African farmer give up his security cameras and barbed wire. The difference between us is that he needs his cameras to meet Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at the safety and security level, while we’re fighting for it on the love and belonging level.
My neighborhood is affluent enough that most people leave their key fobs in their cars. But trusting your kid to be fed a snack or talked to by any random neighbor? It’s just not done. There are only two ways of solving for that. We could move to a poorer, urban neighborhood where lack of employment and lack of options force people to live in something like the old ways. Or we could keep signing up for weekends away, for instruction, for private lessons, and days lost at ProSwing batting cages.
In just two years, my daughter went from awkward posture and shyness to performing no-hands aerials across a stage in high-stakes competitions. In those same two years, we went from feeling alienated and lonely to supported and appreciated. My daughter is flying suspended in the air, held up by unseen forces of trust that are rarely available for free now. We sacrifice time and spend money to defy gravity.