When Is Enough: How To Tell When Your Kid Has Hit Their Limit With School And Activities
It’s 8:47 on a Saturday morning, I’m folding mismatched soccer socks on the couch, and my 10-year-old daughter Lila is coloring at the kitchen table. Her sky-blue crayon, melted a little from being left on the back windowsill all summer, drags across the page. Half a crumbly peanut butter granola bar sits next to her sketchbook, the same one she’s been filling with drawings of stray cats for three months. “Ten minutes till we need to leave for practice,” I call, checking my calendar out of habit. She stops coloring. She sets the crayon down, slow, like she’s setting down something heavy. Then she rests her forehead on the table and says, “I don’t want to go.”
I huff a little, because we paid for the travel team, she scored that goal against the rival club two weeks ago, she kept talking about how much she liked it after the game. “You love soccer,” I say, already slipping my shoes on. “What’s gotten into you this morning?” She doesn’t lift her head. “I’m tired,” she says, and her voice comes out all muffled, like she’s been crying a little already. I walk over, and sure enough, her shoulders are shaking. I sit down across from her, and I start running through the week in my head: Monday after school piano, Tuesday soccer practice, Wednesday advanced math tutoring, Thursday piano again, Friday art class, Saturday soccer practice and a game Sunday. That’s every afternoon full, every weekend booked. Every single thing was her idea first. She asked to try travel soccer after watching her best friend play. She begged for piano lessons after seeing a recital at her school. She came home talking about how fun math prep was, so I signed her up. I never forced anything. I just said yes to the things she said she wanted. How did we end up here?
I pulled out my phone, opened the shared calendar we have with all her activities, and handed it to her. I said, “Cross off anything you don’t have energy for right now. No arguments, no guilt, no talking about contracts or commitments we already made. Just cross it out.” She lifted her head, wiped her cheek on her sleeve, and stared at me like I’d grown a second head. She tapped tutoring first, crossed it out with my finger. I nodded. Then she crossed out all soccer practices for the rest of the month. I nodded again. “What about piano?” I asked. She paused. “Can I still do it, just not the competition in November?” I said yes. “What about art class?” she asked, like she was waiting for me to say that had to go too. I said of course, that’s the only one you never drag your feet to.
I grew up with the rule that you don’t quit things once you start. Quitting was for people who didn’t have grit, who gave up when things got hard. I carried that with me into parenting, so when Lila started saying she was tired, I’d just tell her it’s normal to have hard days, that everyone feels that way sometimes. But that Saturday, I realized I was mixing up “pushing through a bad day” and “crushing under a schedule that doesn’t fit you.”
What I’ve started doing since then, that works for us, is a quick monthly check-in. On the first Sunday of every month, we sit down with the calendar, and Lila rates every activity from 1 to 5. 1 is “I dread it all week” and 5 is “I count down the days till it starts.” Anything that’s a 1 or 2 two months in a row, we cut it. It’s not that I let her quit everything the second it’s hard. If she gets a 3 because soccer practice was boring that month, we talk about what’s bugging her, maybe adjust how we do it. But if it’s consistently a 1, it’s gone. This works way better than waiting for a breakdown like we had that Saturday, because it catches the stress before it builds up.
A lot of parents ask me what about commitments, like signed contracts or team spots that someone else could have. I just be honest. When I called Lila’s soccer coach after that Saturday, I told him she was burnt out, she’d still honor the three games we already committed to that month, but she couldn’t make weekly practice for the rest of the season. He didn’t get mad. He said half his team is burnt out this time of year, he’d rather have kids who want to be there than kids who are dragged in. Most people get it, honestly. No one wins when a kid shows up miserable to every practice.
A week after we cut tutoring and practice, Lila came home from art class, sat down at the piano, and played that little silly song she learned for fun last year, not the competition piece we’d been drilling for months. She played it three times in a row, just grinning. I stood in the hallway and didn’t say anything, and I realized that the things people actually love stick around when you take the pressure off. You don’t have to force them to keep doing it. If it’s important to them, they’ll come back to it when they have space.
Sometimes I still get that little twinge. I see other parents posting about their kids’ competition wins or test scores, and I think, are we doing enough? Is this too little? Lila only has two activities this semester, and she has two afternoons a week where she just comes home, draws, or rides her bike around the neighborhood with the kid next door, or does nothing at all. But she hasn’t put her head down on the table and said she’s tired on a Saturday morning in three months. She still asks to practice piano sometimes, just for fun. We’re still figuring it out. Next year, she might say she wants to add soccer back, or try something new. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, and check in with her when we do. The line between enough and too much isn’t the same for every kid. It just matters that you stop every once in a while to ask where it is.
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