From time to time, Player EQ will share stories from sports parents, players and coaches.
Summertime and the living is easy. Except for parents like me who make the same mistake year… after year… after year.
Sports parenting FOMO
Late winter and spring is when the pre-summer frenzy starts with camps, clinics and activity registration. And just like that, our relaxed summer days are filled with skills clinics, summer leagues, fall sports kick off camps, classes and trainings. Not to mention finishing up the spring club sports and travel sports obligations.
A complete cluster…
Experts, authors and journalists have weighed in for years on the philosophical debate of what constitutes “over-scheduling” for our kids.
My moment of clarity came during the first full week of summer break this year. During our most overscheduled week, we had an insanely busy day, let’s call it the Cluster Day.
Cluster Day was a non-stop, 15-hour confluence of overlapping activities for both of our kids. Yes, 15 hours from 6:45am to 9:45pm. We juggled multiple fall prep camps, skills camps, an away track meet and travel basketball team practice.
Because I take the lead on managing family activities for our two kids, my husband’s response was simply “You did this to yourself.”
You pay for what you get
They were having fun and with their friends, right?
Sure, but we were all paying the price of over-committing with too many activities. I was literally just shuffling them from place to place that week. I didn’t feel like our kids were giving 100% effort or getting 100% out because there were too many activities to process.
I was part uber driver and part youth sports sherpa while hydrating, fueling and feeding my kids like they were running a marathon at full sprint the whole week.
Summer activity burn out was real for us and we were only one week into summer vacation.
Self-induced overscheduled pain
Cluster Day was just a symptom of something larger.
Many families’ schedules are busy, but it doesn’t have to feel frantic. I was determined to lean out of the hectic pace that non-stop commitments (mostly sports related) was creating for our household.
Instead of trying to schedule every minute and wring every second out of each day, I decided after Cluster Day that we needed to take a different approach.
Team obligations would be kept, but I canceled plans for some nonessential camps/activities hoping we would finally get a few additional “quiet” weeks of summer.
ABT versus JOMO
Many parents acknowledge they don’t want their kids to languish academically or athletically over the long summer breaks and during the offseason.
That has given way to the 24/7/365 “ABT: always be training” mindset that can be exhausting for kids and parents to maintain.
I was introduced to JOMO: the joy of missing out when I read an article by author Justin Bariso. JOMO was coined by technologist and entrepreneur Anil Dash back in 2012. I like Bariso’s positioning of JOMO as “the emotionally intelligent antidote for FOMO”.
Enjoying JOMO more is exactly what I needed to help counter the pressure to ABT.
Balance and prioritizing
Italians have an amazing expression that encapsulates JOMO and summer perfectly. It translates to pleasant relaxation in carefree idleness.
It’s called: Dolce Far Niente… the sweetness of doing nothing.
For our family, it was going to be about getting more out of the activities that we did commit to. Experiencing purpose and quality from their summer activities, rather than just a bulk quantity of calendar fillers.
Reflecting on the value of time
We didn’t go off the grid and cancel everything; instead, it became an exercise in being more reflective of the value of our family’s time overall.
Pursuing JOMO and dolce far niente this summer meant focusing more on the important things we had been taking for granted for many months like family dinners together, reading more or just catching a movie together.
Offseason training, camps and summer leagues are an efficient way to keep kids active and not let our kids become couch potatoes, but there is a lot to be said for booking time for our families to do lots of beautiful, unscheduled nothing together all year long.
Hopefully my young athletes will return to school and their favorite sports in the Fall mentally recharged and refreshed, rather than recovering from an over stimulated 10 weeks of summer “fun”.
Resources to explore for perspectives around prioritizing time for family activities:
Inc Magazine – Meet JOMO: The Emotionally Intelligent Response to FOMO, by Justin Bariso
Washington Post – The ‘overscheduled’ child: Is being busy really so bad?, by Andrea Orr
Harvard Graduate School of Education – Usable Knowledge: Summertime, Playtime, by Leah Shafer
PBS.org – The downside of no downtime for kids, by Kayla Calvert Mason
New York Times – Overscheduled Children: How Big a Problem, by Bruce Feiler
CBS News – Over-scheduling kids may be detrimental to their development, by Barbara Bronson Gray
Real Simple – 10 Signs your kids are Overscheduled
Psychology Today – Overscheduled Kids: How much of a good thing is too much?, by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.
– Danielle Mintz, Founder of Player EQ