The Cost of Slowing Down
Recently a friend asked me when we start “locking in” activities for our daughters. “When does it become their thing?” he wondered, meaning when do we encourage them to commit to a single sport and dig in deep.
And I answered with our loose family policy, something Mitch and I agreed upon when the girls are young and have stuck with, more or less, so far: our goal, I told my friend, is not for our daughters to go all in on any one sport, but for them to be active, and to reach the end of each year a little more coordinated than they were at the beginning. So, while we encourage them to give each activity a full year (rather than dropping out mid-year when things get hard), we let the girls shift around, from dance to karate to gymnastics. Around middle school or so, they seem to gravitate toward something they enjoy and press into it more.
But with four kids to transport and pay fees for, we’ve instated a “one sport per kid per year” cap—with the heavily implied footnote that these endeavors are more of a “one class per week” situation than a commitment involving travel, weekend games, or multi-night practices.1
I mean, I’m just one mom with one minivan, you know?
But as I explained all this to my friend, I realized that our rather unambitious approach hasn’t come without a cost. One daughter, who has taken ballet for years, now knows that she won’t be dancing any of those lead roles reserved for the dancers who are in the company, at the studio five nights a week, and who began dancing when they were in preschool. That was a sad realization, to be sure, and it made me wonder if she was paying the price for something we had missed. Another daughter is easily the oldest student in her gymnastics class. I felt that now-familiar pang: “What if we’re getting this all wrong?”
That feeling stuck with me after my friend’s question, niggling uncomfortably, so I sat down to interrogate it. Got what wrong? What measure are we maybe not measuring up to? And I realized it’s a horizontal one. When I worry about things like this, it’s rarely because I’m looking up, at what God has called us to do, and almost always because I’m looking to the left and right, at what other parents are doing. I’m gauging our family’s success by theirs.
But what those other families need may not be what our family needs; the faithfulness they’re called to may not mirror the faithfulness we’re called to. Our daughters may not compete in gymnastics meets or earn their black belts, but they eat dinner at home almost every night, in the company of one another. Most days they finish their homework with time to spare for playing outside or tinkering with the piano or reading for pleasure. They get to bed at a reasonable hour (and then stay up late together, talking or drawing). Sometimes our “extracurricular sport” is a midweek trip to the roller rink, or an impromptu dance party, or a game of pickleball in the park while the sun is still shining.
These things are hard to quantify. There’s no varsity team for especially hilarious after-school conversations, no trophy for a Tuesday evening spent building fairy houses in the backyard, no award for spending an hour talking through some really big feelings with your mom. I doubt college applications ask about students’ attendance scores for family dinner.
But these are beautiful, immeasurable things; the boundaries set for our family are falling, I find, in pleasant places. While some families seem to thrive when they have plenty to do and lots of people to see, ours is quieter, more homeward bound. We take a while to recharge, we benefit from unstructured time, and we need lots of room to process our days.
And so I think it’s okay if the “thing” our daughters lock into isn’t a sport. Maybe it’s a pace of life, one with enough room in it to breathe, and to prize the time spent helping a sister work out her algebra homework, making rice krispie treats, and talking through a difficult day with a parent over a cup of tea.
Maybe the cost of slowing down is worth paying. We’ll see.
- To be clear, I’m not judging how other families handle this, only meditating on how we’ve handled it, and how I’m seeing that play out in our family now, as we reach the later stages of the game. We have many good friends who have chosen differently for their families, and we love and respect these thoughtful parents and have learned much from them over the years. So, I’m not here to make wholesale pronouncements on the value of extracurricular activities or anything—just to reflect a bit on our own family’s decisions.
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- The Cost of Slowing Down - November 12, 2025
- The Biggest Story Family Devotional - July 7, 2025
- Something Better Coming - April 21, 2025
Yes. This is our family. We say of ourselves, \\\”We are a \\\’wide-margin family.\\\’\\\” We don\\\’t function well when frazzled, and we\\\’re slower-going at normal activities. It works for us. But I know the feeling of looking left and right and noticing differences. Owning this definition helps us to feel at-home in it.