Reply to Anyone pay more than $6000 per year for your teen to participate in an expensive sport?

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "Anyone pay more than $6000 per year for your teen to participate in an expensive sport?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is perhaps a controversial response, but I always stepped away from supporting my kids in intensive involvement in a sport--so when they were encouraged to join travel teams or whatnot, I played it down. Encouraged them to try other sports and activities too.  Skip a sport for a year to do something else.  Not because of the financial costs, but the opportunity costs.  Yes, I know that kids love it and develop whole social worlds/bonds around it, [u]but there are so many facets of life: creative endeavors, intellectual activities, play, rest, daydreaming, reading.   Bodies also need varied activities to develop well and avoid injury.  It just seems to cost too much of life for my taste[/u]s.  We probably spend 3k a year per child on varied interests/activities including sports.[/quote]

This is bizarre. [b]Who were the people encouraging them to try travel teams[/b]?[/quote]

Coaches, teammates shifting up to the more intensive travel team from their more low-key local sports involvement, going into more competitive modes which involve more practice time/extensive travel (in one of our child's cases, gymnastics). I'm not sure what about my response you think is bizarre.  We just shifted away from all efforts to "intensify" our kids' involvement in sports even though they were sometimes pegged as being talented [b]because it doesn't[/b] [b]accord with how much we as parents wanted to devote any our life energy to kids' sports[/b].  [/quote]

you didn’t do it despite being told they had a talent for it because of The bolded reason, not your underline ones.  No problem with the choice or why you made it but it seems it’s rwally about not wanting to have your time sucked into the black hole competitive sports requires. [/quote]

No, I think I worded it a bit off there--I think we as parents made a decision that this is not what we valued for our kids' lives --that we felt there's more to growing up well that too much involvement in one sport can eclipse--AND that there was too much in our own lives we valued not to have our time sucked in.  We probably spend just as much time in family activities (we go hiking a lot together, have tickets/memberships at a lot of places, travel) as we would have on their respective sports, but I didn't want to communicate to our kids that one particular sport had that much value if that makes sense.  That said, I think it was helpful we had this foresight to shift gears a bit earlier on to broader engagement in activities--because I think it gets harder when a kid gets more immersed and more of their social ties/rewards/self-esteem are tied up into the one activity.  It was easier to frame it as -- I want you to have time to try all these other cool things too.  So I think there's not one "real" reason but rather a multi-faceted set of values.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics