Are Kids' Activities Stopping Parents From Finding Community?

Some controversial ideas.

For my forthcoming book about adult community-building, I’m devoting an entire chapter to a subject that might perplex some of you: kids' activities. Here’s the twist: I’m actually NOT promoting kids' activities as a way to find your people. I'm calling it out as a part of the culture that is holding us back from building meaningful adult community. For many middle-class and above Americans, kids’ activities or sports have become a central organizing feature and principle of a family's life. Sometimes, the ramp-up is so gradual that the parents don't notice how much it is taking over. It can start with an extra practice added at the start of the new school year, then it ramps up to an increasing number of tournaments. Then comes a coach noticing a kid’s talent, followed by a flattering “invitation” to join the competitive (and expensive) travel version of the sport or activity. I call intensive extracurricular culture and its impact on family life “the Kids' Activity Doom Loop” (KADL).

Often, a doom loop starts with a child's genuine interest in an activity and a parent's natural desire to support it. There are plenty of reasons extracurriculars are beneficial. Kids can have fun, build skills, and have experiences with teamwork, leadership, and hard work. However, the culture and expectations around kids extracurriculars in our modern world can quickly get out of hand and crowd out other interests and opportunities for the whole family, including the parents' personal needs for meaningful community and social connection. A KADL can revolve around an intense single activity, or it can be a mix of recreational activities that, combined, keeps the family in a doom loop with minimal discretionary time. This could look like different travel sports at various seasons, or a mix of sports and activities like multiple soccer teams, ballet, swimming, and music lessons spread among multiple children.

As the whole family spends more and more time and money on these activities, the doom loop can sweep us into a sunk cost fallacy. There’s a sometimes unspoken belief that it’s essential to continue and go deeper into the extracurricular given how much the child, and in some ways the whole family, has “invested” in it. As families get sucked into the doom loop, parents' interests and connections can have a way of starting to fade into the background and disappear. It might start with missing book club during swim season, to realizing there’s no time for book club at all because swimming is now a year-round sport. It could look like missing church every now and again because of travel tournaments, and then suddenly realizing you haven’t been for six months.

So let me be abundantly clear about this next part. The Kids' Activity Loop does not happen because of parents' personal failure. As a society, we’ve cut off many avenues for unstructured and unsupervised play, made aftercare programs expensive and competitive, and shamed parents for letting their kids watch TV and play video games. If you have the means, the only “acceptable” option for how kids are supposed to spend their out-of-school time is in structured, paid activities.

Years of research and reporting on social and economic issues facing families have made it clear to me that a macro driver of the doom loop is anxiety about the collapse of the middle class, and what that means for our children's future security. For many parents, their kids’ future security is tied to going to “the right” college. Researchers have pinpointed the mid-90s as a time when childcare time started to rise among college-educated parents, just as the number of college-bound students began to swell, making colleges more competitive to get into. This led parents to believe that it was a good “investment” to enroll their children in programmed, adult-led enrichment opportunities, to give them a competitive advantage when it was time to apply for college, thereby setting them up for more security throughout their lives. The conscious or unconscious thought process is, “if we don’t start at soccer at five, our kid will be two years behind if they start at seven, which means they’ll never have a chance to make varsity in high school. If we don’t expose them early and often to enriching activities, how will they ever find an interest, excel, and stand out in this competitive world with a minimal safety net to catch them if they don’t make it into the high-earning professional class?”

Many competitive activities can become consuming, but youth sports have the most tentacles for sucking families into doom loops. A 2025 National Youth Sports Parents survey found that parents spend an astonishing 3 hours and 23 minutes per day supporting their kids' sports activities, including driving, prepping meals and snacks, attending practices and games, and coordinating logistics. Additionally, parents volunteer for their kids’ teams for an average of over 4 hours per week, which could look like working a concession stand or timekeeping at swim meets, on top of paying to be a part of a league.. There are great books about problems with youth sports; I recommend Take Back the Game, by Linda Flanagan. But here are a couple of relevant facts I want to share.

• American parents spend​​ more than $30 billion annually on youth sports. Travel sports teams are increasingly run by for-profit companies, including private-equity backed enterprises looking to maximize returns (aka how much they can get parents to pay.)

• Even though many families invest heavily in time-intensive leagues from a young age, 70% of youth athletes will quit the sport by age 13.

• For-profit travel sports leagues play a significant role in denuding and destroying recreational sports leagues. These leagues send coaches to watch and recruit kids out of rec leagues, taking the best players and convincing more parents to go the private route, making it harder for the non-profits to field teams and provide good experiences to a wide variety of kids.

• Roughly just 0.2% of high school athletes receive any amount of college scholarship for their sport. So: let’s do a little math: If you invest an average of $3000 in travel league fees per year for one kid, for one sport for eight years, say from ages 10 to 18, (this amount of money doesn’t include equipment, uniforms, transportation, hotels, and the most valuable of all, parents’ time) you have a 0.2% chance of getting a single dime back in athletic scholarships for your $24,000 investment. If you invested $3,000 per year for 10 years into a 529 college savings fund, with an average of 8% return compounded yearly, you’ll come out with $37,462 in money for your child’s education. 😱

I’m not here to judge you and how you spend your resources as a parent; I’m here to remind you that we may have more choices than we often realize. The stone-cold reality is that you will have difficulty investing in meaningful, fulfilling communities if your time, money, and bandwidth are mainly spent funding, coordinating, and driving to kids' sports practices and games (or fill-in-the-blank activity).

The best defense against getting too wrapped up in your kid's activities is putting up some guardrails over how much an activity dominates your family life, AND having clear interests and priorities outside of your kid's activities and their performance. You can keep them in the rec league close by that has one practice a week, even if they’ve been “invited” to play in a travel league, and they say they want to do travel sports. You can decline to sign them up for summer clinics even though the coach “strongly encourages it,” so it doesn’t decimate your chance at a family vacation. And even if your kid is passionate about an activity and has a full schedule, not attending every game because you have a cookbook club or need downtime is not unsupportive; it is part of a healthy and balanced family structure.

Here’s a list of concrete warning signs you might be on the doom loop:

• You not only attend most or all games, but you also watch most or all practices.

• Eating and homework are regularly done in the car or in transit to accommodate activity requirements.

• You feel that your whole family (however you define it) is rarely all together at home due to kids' activity scheduling.

• You often bring up or talk about your kid’s activity with other adults.

• Decisions about whether to continue an activity are based on how much time and money you’ve already invested.

• Any family member is not getting enough sleep due to the activity schedule.

• As an adult, you cannot regularly attend to your hobbies, interests, social needs, or communities because the activity requires the commitment of the whole family.

• When there is a scheduling conflict with things like church, extended family gatherings, or family trips, the activity usually or always takes precedence.

I’m anticipating some pushback to this framing, including, “Our sports team IS our community! We have amazing lifelong relationships from kids' sports! The whole family loves this life!” If that’s you, God bless and Godspeed. If that is working great for you, consider yourself fortunate because, based on my research and reporting, I’ve found that meaningful community relationships are generally NOT the norm around kids' sports.

A far more common scenario is having surface and cordial relationships with most parents that don’t often translate into deeper connections outside the activity. Also, since the “magnet,” aka the reason you are coming together, is a kid’s achievement, parents can be competitive with other players and hyper-focused on their kids' success. Kids' sports can also be transient within teams or leagues, making longer-term connections more tenuous. For example, you could hit it off with one family on your kids' travel soccer team, but never see them regularly again after your kids get placed on different teams the following season. Also, suppose your kids’ interest and skill level in a sport is the central way you are personally finding a connection. That places a lot of pressure on the kid to excel and continue with an activity because you have become so invested in their participation. It’s also risky. Kids are not athletes forever. And you may lose your sense of community and connection if your kid quits, gets injured, or naturally ages out.

Next week, for paying members of the How to Find Your People Club, I’ll be going over tactics to avoid getting on the doom loop and some ways to think about reprioritizing time if you are already on the doom loop.

👉 All right, y’all, just a reminder, these ideas are not meant as a personal attack on anyone. I’ll say again that extracurriculars can be great because kids have fun, build skills, and have experiences with teamwork, leadership, and hard work. What I am questioning is how for-profit companies are creating expensive and consuming experiences that can take over family life and parents’ free time, and how that can be a blocker to meaningful community connection.

Let’s all be gentle and open-minded in the comments. This is not a space for flame-throwing about parenting choices. You have the rest of the internet for that!