As a parent, you are no stranger to the fact that kids are expensive. You love them and they are such an enhancement to your life, but over the course of raising kids, you will spend copious amounts of your income raising children. One of the biggest expenses for a lot of parents is money spent on extra curricular sports. Sports are a great way to help children expend energy. They also provide youth with life lessons including developing good fitness habits, sportsmanship, handling successes without too much gloat and losses with dignity. For as great of lessons as sports and physical activities teach, there are as many lessons to be learned by supplementing your kids with educational extra circular activities. In this post, we’ll talk about the expense of sports, why they are generally more utilized than educational supplementation and recommendations for balancing it all.
The Expense of Sports
The cost of participating in club or league sports is astronomical compared to what recreational sports used to cost 30+ years ago. Parents can spend upwards of $10k per child per year on sports, depending on the sport – especially if it’s a traveling team. Club soccer, volleyball, cheerleading, baseball and hockey are some of the most expensive ranking kids club sports across the nation, but even sports like badminton can be very expensive. Here is a look at the national average cost for some of the most popular club sports:
Not to mention activities like private music lessons, band or girl/boy scouts. They are also very expensive club/private activities that parents shell out for.
Even school-based sports are getting more expensive, in part to the level of competition that club sports are creating. When children enter competitive sports so early, it makes it almost impossible to for high school kids to make teams if they haven’t competed in club sports most of their life. In high school, there are still gear and uniform fees, clinic fees, camp fees, team dinner fees and travel fees if they end up being good. Then there’s private coaching that a lot kids continue with outside of the high school season to remain in condition.
Why Pay so Much for Sports?
There are plenty of reasons why it’s great to have kids in sports from a young age. Team experiences, friendship, winning and losing gracefully are all lessons a lot of parents recall having. Not to mention, fun. You find your tribe when you’re part of a team and you go through experiences together. It helps you understand how to bond with others later on in life too. Many parents also like to occupy their kids’ time to make sure they stay out of trouble. As mentioned earlier, not being in club sports at an early age can make it harder for kids to continue with sports at a high school level. If parents are strategically thinking about how to keep their kid involved in school and out of trouble in high school, they are likely trying to foster and develop skills in their kids when they are young to be able to compete at high school level.
Then there are those who might see significant talent in their kids from a young age, do they attempt to cultivate that talent, perhaps seeing where it can take their kid. Scholarship? University? Professional? It’s hard to tell from such a young age. Talent is some of it but drive and mental conditioning are also huge factors in the making of collegiate and professional athletes. There’s a great NY Times article about three professional athletes – Travis Dorsch, Mike Trombley and John Amauchi – all whom grew up playing their respective sports and went from youth to high school to university to professionals. Despite that they are from varying backgrounds and play three different sports, they all agree on one thing; the way youth sports are played today with all the money, time and energy spent on them in club sports is possibly misplaced. One thing is for certain, when children no longer want to continue with a sport, their wants should be heard. It’s not that they should just sit around and do nothing but forcing kids to participate in sports they are no longer interested in can have devastating long-term negative effects on them physiologically.
Are We Doing Things Right?
As we’ve already covered, sports are great. They contain so many valuable lessons. Perhaps the biggest take-away is to approach sports with a sense of realism. Don’t count on athletic scholarships paying for college and be sure to approach their athletics with balance. Enhancing sports with academic and music supplementation can make them very well rounded, well connected people as they grow into adults. Math, in particular, will continue to be a vital component for a lot of students wanting to continue with their education beyond high school. It’s also important for many of the top paying careers, such as computer science, engineering, finance, medical personnel, economics and information technology.
