030: Managing Your Child’s Interests Without Overloading Your Schedule

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Many parents fear that if they don’t get their kids involved in many activities at a young age, they won’t have an opportunity to excel at whatever they choose in the future. This leads to overloaded schedules, stressed out parents, and burned out kids.

In today’s episode Ben and Rachel talk about a healthy approach to managing our child’s interests and balancing that with our schedules. Our goal is to discover how we can be supportive of our child’s pursuits without jam packing our lives.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Our children may seem interested in something, but we need to give them room to explore it.
• Let your child define what their interest looks like and drive that pursuit.
• People don’t want their children to miss out on opportunities to excel at something because they aren’t participating in.
• Your child’s commitment to work hard at an activity matters more than how early they got involved.
• Allow your child to focus on one thing at a time.
• When we’re faced with too many options, it stresses us out—this is especially true for children.
• If your older children want to be involved in more than one thing, that’s okay, but now they need to be responsible for how that happens.
• Put your child in a position where they have to think critically.
• Whether or not your child is successful is not your responsibility.
• It boils down to the relationship between you and your child—if something is a consistent point of conflict, don’t continue doing it.

Show Notes

• 04:27 Ben: We’ve talked before about being supportive of your child’s interests). I want to go more into the logistical side of it—the approach we take in managing our children’s interests. This is not only about how we support them in that, but how we do so without packing our lives full of stuff and feeling overwhelmed all the time.

Let Kids Drive Their Own Interests

• 05:11 As parents and adults, we have a lot of experiences. We have our own definitions of certain things. Jadon, our oldest, is interested in being a film maker. I immediately have my own ideas of what it looks like to be a film maker. I’ve got my own definition of it. If I’m not careful, I can very easily assert my version of that instead of allowing him to drive his version of what that means. His definition of being a film maker might be completely different from my own. It’s likely that his definition is more idealistic and mine is much more specific because of the experience that I have. If I try to put my specific version onto him, that’s going to overwhelm him and will probably lead to way more activity than we should have at this stage and level of interest.
• 06:19 He may seem very interested in it, but he’s just exploring it. Our children may seem interested in something, but we need to give them room to explore it. If it’s something they really are serious about wanting to do, that desire is going to drive their level of activity. We don’t have to do that for them. That’s one of the ways we tend to overload ourselves as parents. We assume too much and we assert our own definition, so we add all these extra activities that we don’t really need to add. We need to let our children be in charge of that process for themselves. When Jadon first said he was interested, do you remember what we did, Rachel?
• 07:12 Rachel: For Christmas? We got him a storyboard and gave him an old iPhone as a filming camera. We kind of went all out. He never storyboarded. I’m actually using the whiteboard we gave him for my brainstorming stuff right now.
• 07:36 Ben: I would say that we went a little bit overboard. Fortunately, we didn’t go as far as to enroll him in filmmaking activities.
• 07:43 Rachel: We did look at a charter school that had a film program in it. We seriously considered it.
• 07:54 Ben: We checked out a bunch of books from the library. It was a stack of really thick books on filmmaking.
• 08:00 Rachel: I read them all, but he didn’t read any.
• 08:05 Ben: It’s funny how we have this tendency to do this as parents. Jadon says he’s interested in film making, but right now his activity is making comic books. That is a form of storyboarding, if you think about it. It’s an important part of the process if, one day, he decides he wants to do film making seriously. I could come in as a parent and say, “You’re not film making. You’re making comics.”

Let your child define what their interest looks like.

• 08:50 Rachel: I feel like we’re a little bit different than some other parents. Kids our kids’ age are generally involved in a lot of sports, like soccer and pee wee football. We’ve never gravitated toward any of that.
• 09:12 Ben: I want to address that. Although we don’t involve ourselves in those kinds of activities, as creative and artistic people, we could be tempted by something similar in the creative and artistic world.
• 09:31 Rachel: With organized sports, every neighbor we have is gone every Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday because they have sporting event practices or games. That’s a different world, because it consumes. We can’t speak from experience about that, because we have sort of intentionally stayed away from it.
• 10:01 Ben: If we wanted to, we could be as involved in the creative realm. Sports and athletics related activities are more prominent in our culture, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any less of a possibility that we could become that involved. Artistic activities are capable of demanding just as much time as sports. They don’t tend to, but they’re just as capable. It has to start from a place of values. We aren’t part of that athletic culture that drives that level of activity, and there isn’t as much of a driver of that level of activity in the creative realm. We also have this value we operate from about how we spend our time and how we schedule ourselves that naturally caused us to be restrictive in those areas.

Fear Of Missing Out

• 11:20 Though we can’t speak from experience on the athletics side, the principles and values still apply. Here’s what I think is going on with that. Have you heard of FOMO, Rachel? FOMO is Fear Of Missing Out. Fear Of Missing Out is something we experience even as adults. We will commit ourselves or say yes to things because we don’t want to miss out on the possible reward that can come from being involved in that activity. In athletic culture, and really in any area of interest your child might take on, there is the potential for that Fear Of Missing Out for your child to come into play. People think, “The earlier I get them involved, the better,” because:

People don’t want their children to miss out on opportunities to excel at something they aren’t participating in.

• 12:53 When I was a junior in high school, I had this idea one day that I wanted to try out for the baseball team. I thought it would be fun, so I walked up to the coach during a practice and asked him what I would need to do to try out for the team. He laughed at me and was dismissive and said, “Most of these kids have been playing together since Little League.” Before that, he asked me if I had played baseball before. I said, “Do you mean on a team or just in my neighborhood?” He said that I could try out, but it was like he was saying, “Good luck.” There was this understood idea that if you wanted to be involved, you had to get an early start.
• 13:55 Rachel: That’s crazy, because when we were kids, it was really only Little League and baseball. I remember my parents signing me up for Little League, and I cried every practice because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. That was the only thing they had for kids. Now, there’s everything. There’s science camp and after school activities. The amount of things you can choose from is crazy.
• 14:26 Ben: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any one of those things.
• 14:31 Rachel: I’m just saying that we have a huge amount of choices. You can get completely carried away, especially if you don’t have six kids. You have more time to play with.
• 14:46 Ben: When we’re taking about the Fear Of Missing Out, the belief is, “I’ve got to get my child involved early and I have to get them involved in many things. I don’t know which one they’re going to be interested in, and I don’t want them to miss out on the chance of excelling at the thing they’re going to choose in the future.” I want to speak to that fear. Depending on where you live, it might be more true that a child who doesn’t get involved early doesn’t have as much of a chance. In every case, the level of commitment, practice, and hard work that your child puts into the thing they’re interested in creates more of a determination for whether or not they’re going to be on the A-team.

Your child’s commitment to work hard at an activity is more of a determining factor for their future excellence than how early they got involved.

• 16:01 If somebody goes out there and they’ve only been playing for a couple of years vs. these kids who have been playing together since they were little, if they do an amazing job, they get results, and they make things happen, sure they’ll get a chance to start and to play more. In the end, the results are really what matters, not how long they’ve been doing it and whether or not they have that history with the other teammates. Being able to work with people on a team and have camaraderie comes into play, too, but those things don’t have to develop from when you’re a little kid.
• 16:57 Rachel: Our oldest used to take piano lessons. We’re musical people, and we wanted to get him involved and give him a foundation in music. He never wanted to practice. At a certain point, if you’re not putting in that practice time, you’re not going to get better anyway. Just because you’re enrolled in something doesn’t mean you’re going to be super awesome at it.
• 17:29 Ben: That’s one of the possibilities. You get your kid involved early in something, and because they’re not interested, it doesn’t matter how many years they do it. That’s part of it. The other part of it reminds me of a book we read called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell talks about the idea of 10,000 hours. I have a theory, and I believe this plays out more often than not. 10,000 hours typically looks something like ten years of practice.
• 18:10 Rachel: Full time work, basically. The way those hours are spent matters.
• 18:25 Ben: From one pursuit to another, there are some things you learn that you can apply as credit hours toward those 10,000 hours. Though it’s not in the same field, some of the level of discipline you experience with working through discomfort and things you don’t like to get to the thing you really do like about whatever it is, all of those things you learn can be applied. Within the same field, if it’s something athletic—maybe you’re going from one sport to another—your athleticism and your ability to make quick decisions can be transfered over to other pursuits as well. Part of the fear is, “If I don’t get them started early in a lot of different things, they’re not going to be at the level that these other kids, who have been doing this one thing for a long time, will be at.”

When your child is interested in something and is putting their intentional practice into it, at least some of that can carry over into the next thing.

• 19:46 Rachel: One of the things Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers is that the 10,000 hours, if you don’t practice them correctly, won’t bring you any closer to the goal you have. For instance, when I was in high school I played the clarinet. Every single day, I would practice for two hours to a metronome. When I missed a note, I would go back and do it over again. I would do varying tempos, so I would start out slow so I figured out all of the fingerings, and then I would go faster. That is the right way to practice. If you have somebody who started earlier than I did who practices, who continues practicing the same song and makes the same mistakes over and over again, they’re really training themselves to play with mistakes.
• 20:38 The hours matter, no matter how early you start. When I think about starting my kids early in things, I think about the fact that kids don’t develop the discipline to practice something until they’re probably ten… unless they’re forced, and then you may fight all the time.
• 21:04 Ben: Unless they’re super duper interested. That’s kind of a unique thing. It’s rare to have a child that young be so genuinely interested in something.
• 21:18 Rachel: Interestingly, a lot of Aspergers kids are very, very focused on one thing, and that’s a really good thing for them.

Give Your Child Fewer Choices

• 21:29 Ben: I hope that speaks to some of the fears. These are some of the practices I would bring in when it concerns making decisions about what to get your child involved in. One thing that makes it really difficult for children, and this is a difficult thing for adults too, is being faced with too many choices. When we’re faced with too many options, it stresses us out—this is especially true for children. They don’t want cable TV with 900 channels. They don’t want Netflix with 5,000 titles they can choose from. My kids always have an easier time when I say, “Do you want to watch this or this?”
• 22:19 Rachel: Depending on the age, you can add to those choices. For our three year olds, it’s usually only two choices. Sometimes, for the nine year old, we can give him three and let him choose from those.
• 22:33 Ben: When it comes to your child’s interests, let’s say they don’t tell you specifically what they’re interested in, but you know they want to get involved in some kind of activity and have some socialization with friends. If you choose just two things and say, “You can do this or this,” that’s going to cut down on the number of things you’re committing your child to, and it takes the stress out of that decision for your child while still giving them a choice. If what they’re really interested in doing isn’t one of those two choices, it’s okay. Maybe you put those choices in front of them and they say, “I don’t want to do either of those. All I really want to do is this.” If they can speak with that much clarity about what they really want to do, let them do that.

Focus On One Interest At a Time

• 23:40 I’m a big fan of allowing our child to explore one interest at a time seriously. As they get older, we’ll talk about expanding their freedom to be involved in other things. As a value, when we’re just focused on one thing, we’re able to have more effective practice at that thing. We can learn sooner whether or not it is truly something we’re interested in doing. There’s a principle we talk about on the seanwes podcast that focuses more on business, but it’s the idea of failing faster. If your child is interested in something and they want to try it out, allow them to focus on that one thing.
• 24:38 If it’s going to end up being something they don’t love and they find out in practice that they’re not really interested in, you want them to find that out sooner rather than later so you don’t drag them through that. If it is something they’re interested in, they can grow faster in their skill if they’re just focused on one thing. I wish that as an adult, I wish I had a parent telling me, “Ben, you can only focus on one thing right now.”
• 25:09 Rachel: When I was in high school, I was in everything. I was class president, student council, all the sports, band, journalism—anything they had. It was crazy.
• 25:27 Ben: There’s nothing wrong with enjoying doing many things and being good at a lot of things. Many, if not most, people are good at doing many different things.

The value of focusing on one thing at a time is that you get to give it your best effort.

• 25:40 You get the most out of it in the shortest amount of time. I find that to be much more efficient than trying to spread that effort out over many things. You have a better experience with it, because you don’t have the associated stress of being involved in a lot of things. For Rachel, who was involved in student council, band, and all these other things, if she looks back on that and feels stressed out when she thinks about student council, student council doesn’t deserve her feelings of stress. If she was only doing that one thing, it might have really been a joy for her.
• 26:39 Rachel: What I remember most from high school is worry. I worried about everything, because I was so involved. I was never able to focus on one thing.

Set Boundaries

• 26:54 Ben: A natural byproduct of focusing on one thing at a time is that it fits into our schedules and our lives better. Cory asked a question earlier about how this scales when you have more children. We have six. We’ll get to another aspect of this as we talk about older children, too, but even at six children, I feel like we’re able to handle supporting them in one interest at a time per kid.
• 27:35 Rachel: Our oldest is taking art lessons right now, and we don’t have anybody else in anything yet. The second oldest has been asking, and the third oldest has been asking to play soccer. Finding the time for all of that is crazy, even with one interest per child.
• 27:58 Ben: It’s definitely going to be a challenge, but I’m willing to commit to being supportive of one thing at a time per child. Something we can do even before our children really start to show interest or are old enough to be involved in activities is to establish our personal boundaries early on. A lot of parents don’t think, “I need to protect my personal time and my work time.” They’re very sacrificial for their children, which is good. It’s good to be sacrificial.

If you sacrifice for your kids to the point where you’re not able to take care of yourself, how long is that going to last before you’re doing more harm than good?

• 28:50 Rachel: It’s not only more harm to yourself as far as energy, but also the relationship with your child. Whenever we aren’t taking care of ourselves, in our subconscious, we can blame the child for that. When you’re so incredibly overbooked because of your kid’s activities, at a certain point, that’s going to come back as bitterness.
• 29:27 Ben: When your children do start being involved in activities, that’s a great time to exercise those boundaries. Limiting them to one activity doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t letting them explore different interests, like letting them read books and stuff like that. I’m talking about being committed to a weekly or biweekly practice for an interest.
• 28:58 Rachel: What adds to your schedule as a parent.
• 30:02 Ben: For example, Jadon’s one interest right now is art and the lessons he’s taking for art. Even though he says he’s interested in filmmaking, what he’s focusing on more right now is his art.
• 30:22 Rachel: Every Thursday, that requires an extra trip somewhere.
• 30:26 Ben: If he came to us and said, “I really want to be involved in a filmmaking school,” or, “I want to take lessons for how to make films,” we would give him a choice. We would say, “Do you want to continue doing art lessons or do you want to start doing film lessons?” We know that doesn’t mean that he’s going to stop drawing things. He’s going to continue to develop his artistic skills on his own if it’s something he’s truly interested in, but for the family, for our boundaries, for the sake of us being able to sustain and scale our ability to support our children, we have to limit that.
• 31:08 Ben: If we practice that early on, as our children get older and they have more of a capacity to try various things and maybe take on two or three interests at a time, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re still allowing your child to be the driver of that activity. I said “driver,” and that’s kind of a funny term. A lot of parents of older children, teenagers, or young adults complain about having to be the chauffeur. I can’t speak from practical experience, but I have a theory, and this is an approach we’re going to try with our kids. I will still drive them to one of their activities, rehearsals, or practices, whatever it is.

If your older children want to be involved in more than one thing, that’s okay, but now they need to be responsible for how that happens.

• 32:25 It could be that it works out and I have the time to do it, but what if something comes up or my responsibilities grow in some way with my job or I’m going through a season with my side passion where I’m having to spend more time on that? There’s great benefit to putting your child in a position where they have to think critically and creatively about how they’re going to make something happen that they want to happen, without the help of their parents. They have to figure it out without the help of the place that seems the most obvious. That doesn’t mean that you can’t come alongside your child and help them solve that problem. Make suggestions like, “Do you have any friends that are also involved that you might be able to get a ride with?” Or, “Do you have the time to work an extra job to save up some money to buy a car or a bike?”

Learning From Experience

• 33:28 Rachel: Looking back on my super involved time in junior high and high school, I think I would have enjoyed someone saying, “You’re probably never going to play professional volleyball. It’s not going to get you a scholarship to a college of choice.” It was an hour and a half every week of practice. What if I used that time for something else, like to write books—something I was really interested in that could have been my job? What is our responsibility as parents when it comes to those kinds of things?
• 34:15 Ben: This approach sets an example early on and it allows our child to experience the benefits of just focusing on one thing at a time. Taking that approach early on, as our children gets older, leads to them thinking more in terms of, “I maybe can do one or two things at a time.” They’ll be conditioned for that. They will have the outside influence of their peers and other people who are involved in a lot of different things. At that stage in our child’s development, I don’t want to be the heavy-handed parent who says, “No, you can’t. That’s too many things.” I don’t want to make that decision for them.
• 35:14 I will say, “This is what we can do as a family to support you. Beyond that, if you really want to be involved in that many things, you’re going to have to figure out how to make that happen.” Some kids may need to have the experience of being involved in a lot of things and experiencing the burnout. That was me, not specifically for being involved in a lot of things, but I’ve always felt like I needed to learn things by experience. That’s not a fun way to learn things all the time.
• 35:50 I’ve been working on this as an adult, and I’m more likely to take the advice of somebody who has experienced it vs. having to experience it myself. As a young person, I was very much saying, “I’m going to experience it myself. I’ll prove you wrong.” Sometimes, our children have to go through those experiences and fail on their own and not be met with an “I told you so.”
• 36:23 Rachel: I know that Ben already addressed this, but I think about all of the things our kids come home with. It feels like every day there’s a flier for an art camp, science camp, or math camp. From my experience, when I see those things, the first thought I immediately think is, “Oh my gosh, I have to get my kid signed up. They’re going to fall behind their peers.” Once I start thinking about it, I think about some of the greats we have in the art, math, or science worlds, and I would be willing to bet that they never went to a science camp when they were a Kindergartener. Most of those people were experimenting on their own.
• 37:19 Ben: Regardless of whether or not they did, the possibility exists that there are greats who came out of art camp and there are greats who didn’t have any formal training. As long as those two possibilities exist, why would we tie ourselves down to some idea of how we think it has to be done in order for our child to experience success? Why would we as parents feel like we need to make ourselves responsible for our child being successful at something?
• 37:50 Rachel: It’s hard not to feel responsible for your child being successful.

Whether or not your child is successful is not your responsibility.

• 38:07 Ben: There’s a lot more to it than just that simple statement, but I want you to wrestle with that idea. You’re not responsible for your child’s success.

Make the Most of Activity Time

• 38:24 If you are doing the chauffeur thing and you’re involved in helping your child get to their activities and being there with them while they get their lesson, don’t regard that time as lost. I can either have an attitude of, “I don’t get this time back, so I guess I’m losing an hour every week having to drive Jadon to his lesson,” or I can be creative and think, “Okay, how can I make this time meaningful?” Obviously, I can’t get focused work done. If I’m driving him to a lesson, I can’t get housework done. There’s a whole list of things I can’t do with that time.
• 39:12 Rachel: Right, but what can you do?
• 39:16 Ben: Number one on my list is that I can foster my relationship with my children during that time. The other boys come with us, so that’s time I can spend with them and hang out, if I want to. That’s meaningful. I could even build some ritual into that and say, “When we take Jadon to his lesson, we have a conversation about this. That’s something we do every week.” It becomes this rhythm in our lives.
• 39:45 Rachel: You guys do have a memory from one of those lessons, an ABC song that’s hilarious.
• 40:20 Ben: You can also schedule learning time for those times when you’re on the road. Let the kids do their thing, and you’ve got earbuds in or something playing a podcast, a TED talk, or something like that. You could listen to an audio book. We talked before about “light work”—work that doesn’t require a ton of your focus but is administrative stuff you have to get through. You might be able to bring some of that with you and get it done. You could spent that time having some reflection or resting and say, “This is going to be my rest time.” Depending on how old your children are, it may not feel that way.
• 41:09 Rachel: In the car, it always seems like it’s a little bit better because they’re strapped down.
• 41:44 Ben: Don’t hold your expectations of what you can accomplish with that time too high, because the purpose is not to make every second productive. The purpose is get you to stop thinking of it as lost time and be thinking in terms of how you can make that time meaningful. If you can do other stuff there that you might have scheduled somewhere else, it can free up some space in your schedule for you to be able to do other things. That will, in turn, make your schedule feel a little bit less packed.

Work Together to Solve Conflicts

• 42:26 Even if you’re just doing one thing per child, it’s likely that you’re going to run into some conflict. Maybe your work requires you to be there at the only time they’re offering a specific practice or something like that. Be careful not to bend too much. If it’s something that you can easily shift your schedule at work and make possible, that’s fine. If it’s something that’s going to require some sacrifice on your part and make it really difficult and stress you out, you’re better off spending your energy on problem solving with your child and coming up with a different way for them to pursue that interest for that season.
• 43:20 It could be that, for that season, instead of being able to go to this practice, you check out books from the library or look up videos on YouTube and you have a time set aside every week where they sit and learn. That’s what they do and how they pursue that interest during that season. This puts our child on the side of problem solving, so in the future, if they run into a similar situation where there’s something they want to do but the ideal time is not available for them, it helps them be more creative and resourceful, to look for ways around their constraints to what they really want to do and work their way toward the ideal.

Activities That Help Your Child Grow

• 44:25 Cynthia asked, “How do you balance engaging what your child is interested in naturally and activities that help them grow, even if they aren’t interested?” She went on to say that her younger brother has Aspergers, and he didn’t have any interest in engaging with other people or being social. For a while, he was enrolled in Boy Scouts, and he hated it. She went on to say that she didn’t feel like that was effective, but her parents wanted him to grow socially. There’s a huge difference between a child who isn’t very socially adept and an Aspergers child, because Aspergers really does have some nearly insurmountable hurdles when it comes to engaging with people socially.
• 45:26 There are behaviors and things that can be learned over time, but there are also different stages in development when that’s even possible. It may have been that, at the time, when he was enrolled in Boy Scouts, he wasn’t developmentally capable of making those connections. That was frustrating. Bringing it back to the question about how we balance what our child is really interested in with activities we see will help them to grow as a person, how would you answer that, Rachel?
• 46:04 Rachel: I go back to when our oldest took piano lessons. The reason he started taking piano lessons was not because he was really interested in it—it was because we wanted him to take them and get a foundation in music. Piano is the place where you get a foundation. Seeing how many times we had conflict over the practice opened my eyes to see that you can’t really make your kid do something.
• 46:39 Ben: You can make them do something.
• 46:43 Rachel: I’m talking about making them do something they don’t enjoy. If you’re constantly fighting over it and that relationship is at stake, then it’s probably time to brainstorm on something else that could be done. Obviously, there are going to be points of conflict on things like homework that has to be done, but for something like piano lessons, when he doesn’t want to do it, the only time he’s going to practice is when we make him practice. It could be that, later on in his life, he chooses to take piano lessons. It’s not going to be too late. He already knows musical scales and chords.

It boils down to the relationship between you and your child—if something is a consistent point of conflict, don’t continue doing it.

• 47:47 Ben: We’re talking about two separate things here. There’s the interest and the activity supporting that interest, and then there’s somewhere that we as parents felt we needed to intervene and get help for a specific area of growth for our child. Having our child involved in a program that helps them grow that they’re not interested in doesn’t always look like something that they hate. I’m really hesitant to want to intervene. Life is a better teacher than that, especially if I’m fostering my relationship with my child.
• 48:36 Rachel: What do you mean by intervene?
• 48:39 Ben: For example, if we thought that Jadon needed to take piano lessons so he would learn his scales and have a musical foundation. As an interest, that’s one thing. If we wanted him to take piano lessons because we felt that it would help him develop discipline, honestly, I think there are other things that he can experience naturally, as part of being involved in a family where he has to contribute, that will help him naturally develop discipline.
• 49:23 Making him take lessons so he’ll learn discipline is me intervening as a parent. There was an intervention that was more necessary, where he was having difficulty controlling his anger, so we took him to counseling. While that was going on, he was still doing music lessons. He was involved both in counseling, where he was learning to manage his emotions a little bit better, and he was involved in this activity. I want to go back to the principle, what can you and your family handle and still maintain your boundaries? If it’s possible for them to be involved in both, that’s great. It might be something where you as a parent truly need to be in intervention mode in helping your child develop in an area where they’re behind, that could be a detriment to them in the future.
• 50:31 I want to be really careful and slow to make those decisions. It’s okay to say, “For now, we’re going to have you focus on this. We’re going to stop these lessons for this season while you’re developing in this area. That doesn’t mean that you can’t draw in your free time.” If your child is interested in something, they’re going to find a way to do it. I’m just talking about the supported activity.