Finding Balance: Rejecting the Pressure to Overschedule Our Children

Have you ever felt trapped on the hamster wheel of children's activities, racing from soccer to dance to tutoring with barely a moment to breathe? You're not alone. In this refreshingly honest episode, I share my radical decision to cancel ALL my children's fall extracurricular activities—and why it might be the best parenting move I've made in years.

The "busy badge of honor" that many parents wear has become a status symbol in modern parenting. But at what cost? I reveal how my family's packed schedule left little time for homework, family dinners, or simply being present with my children. The realization hit me: we don't need to fill every moment of our children's lives with structured activities for them to thrive.

Looking back at my own childhood as an '80s kid, I reflect on how different things were—one dance class here, a season of soccer there—yet I turned out perfectly fine. This leads to a deeper conversation about the immense pressure we put on today's children to excel in everything from preschool to college, often pushing them down paths they never chose for themselves. The truth is, many of us with expensive degrees aren't even using them, having made major life decisions at 17 or 18 that didn't align with who we truly became.

What would happen if we stepped back and asked: what truly matters? What if success isn't measured by how many activities we can squeeze into a week, but by finding what genuinely lights us up? This fall, I'm choosing a different path—one with more breathing room, more focus on education, and more time for my family to simply be together.

Whether you're feeling overwhelmed by your family's schedule or questioning the path you're on, this episode invites you to reconsider what "having it all" really means. Follow me on social media to join upcoming live streams where we'll continue these important conversations about parenting, purpose, and finding your own definition of success.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Still Rose's Podcast
• 0:34 Decision to Skip Fall Activities
• 2:28 Reflecting on Childhood Activities
• 5:31 Rethinking Education and Success
• 8:40 Choosing What Lights You Up
• 9:40 Closing and Social Media Invitation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello everyone. This is Still Rose's podcast. This podcast was created for women, by women, to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is having a wonderful August. Countdown in my house has started to the first day of school. I'm waiting for all the letters to come so I can get my kids assignments in their classrooms and all that kids' assignments in their classrooms and all that. I know school has started for quite a few states already. In New Jersey we haven't started yet not in my area anyway and so we wait with bated breath for everything to start happening again.

Speaker 1: 0:34

I made the executive decision this year to not have any of my kids enrolled in sports or extracurricular activities in the fall. This might sound like not that big of a deal to everybody listening right now, but for me this is a huge deal. Up until this point, I have very much been the mom who's like let me enroll my kids in as many activities as possible because I want them to be well-rounded individuals and I want them to try a lot of things, because then they're figuring out what they like. This is the logic that I've been using, and then you definitely heard me complaining about those, and then the realization would hit me that oh wait, I've signed my kids up for activities that occur every single day of the week and in some instances overlapping days, meaning like there's two or three activities happening on one day. This was kind of a nightmare last year for me in the spring. I had the twins were each enrolled in two activities each. My son kind of a nightmare last year for me in the spring. I had the twins were each enrolled in two activities each. My son kind of backed off. He was he's not, he's not into sports at all. So he was very much like I don't really care how many to be in anything, he's more of a laid back young man, if you will. Um, which in this instance I was like no problem, let's not, I'm not going to push, I'm already overloaded.

Speaker 1: 2:06

And then, you know, I got busy at work and things were like hectic and it really started to bother me that we were so busy all the time. I know some people really relish that. I know a lot of moms that are like into it. They seem like they really like it, like that they're. It's like a stamp of achievement, like I'm really busy all the time, I'm running around all the time. I don't want that stamp of achievement.

Speaker 1: 2:29

And the other thing I also wanted to note and this is a downfall on my side was emphasizing being enrolled in all these activities so much that we weren't actually doing homework or anything. Now the kids were younger and the teachers didn't assign homework for the classes that they had, so it wasn't too big of a deal, but it still was, because you know the days that we were like double timing it with different activities and this, that the next thing I'm not practicing reading with them. You know I'm not practicing their math problems Like I'm not over, I'm not leaning into their education, I'm not practicing their math problems Like I'm not over, I'm not leaning into their education. And this summer it really hit me and I started thinking more and more about it. I'm like I want them to be able to come home from school, sit down and do homework and eat dinner, like in this order. I want this normalcy and less hectic. So I just decided nobody's going to do anything. Perhaps I might put them in some kind of music Saturday class thing, but I don't think so and honestly I'm super excited about it. Like to be able to just focus on being a family and this lower pace and really digging into school and seeing what we can do to really help them excel, and that's what I want my main focus to be Now. If all goes well in the fall and I can put them all in activities in spring, I'm going to do it. But it really just hit me all of a sudden. I'm like you know what. I don't want to sign them up for anything. I'm going to save some money, I'm going to save my sanity, I'm going to focus on their education and I'm not going to enroll them in a bunch of activities. I don't need to.

Speaker 1: 4:07

The other part of this that I started thinking about was I mean guys listening to this, raise your hand. If you're an 80s baby, did you have activities every night of the week? I sure as heck didn't. My parents enrolled me in like one dance class once and they told me that, like I complained every single day, which you know sounds about right I did that once. I think I did soccer one year once for the town, and then I did school sports when I got older, but at that point I was already doing my own homework and it wasn't like a big deal. It didn't really affect me and I'm a well-rounded individual. So you know, like I started thinking about it, I'm like I turned out okay and I wasn't at activities. You know, every single day of the week, like we don't need to do that.

Speaker 1: 4:52

And now that I'm talking about this out loud, I feel like we really we put so much pressure on our kids today to be these like overachievers in all these categories. Because they have to, they have to shine, they have to excel, they have to get into the right preschool to get to the right grammar school, to get to the right high school, to get to the best college. If you want to go that path, I'm not really pushing my kids through that path at all. I want them to be educated and well-rounded, but not in the traditional sense of the terms. Now, I went to college. I know a lot of people that went to college. I'm one of the very few people that actually uses my degree.

Speaker 1: 5:31

There's a lot of people out there in my generation that went to college because that's just what you did. That's what we were told you were supposed to do. That was the quote, unquote key to successful. You know, being a success and having money was go to college. Pop that bubble, because so many of us have hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt that we're like drowning under, and you know they keep waving the carrot that student loan debt is going to go away. We're stuck with this for until we die, basically, and it sucks if you didn't use your degree Like good Lord. I mean, imagine that, thank God, I actually got a degree in something that I happened to like, which is communications, but, like a lot of people didn't do that because, really think about this when you graduate from high school, you're 17, 18 years old and you're picking a major that you're supposed to do for the rest of your life, who the hell? I just rediscovered myself at 38. How are you supposed to know what you want to do when you're 17 or 18?

Speaker 1: 6:35

When I originally started college, I was a psychology major and I wanted to go into psychology and I wanted to be a psychologist and I wanted to help people in that sense of the term, and then eventually I switched to communications because, to be perfectly transparent here, it came really easily to me. Communications was something that always came super easy to me and I was like, let me just lean in here, like why am I beating a dead horse, like I could just lean in here and this would make me some money at some point. So you know, I picked the path that I picked and I'm fine, like I'm okay, but there's a lot of people that like have master's degrees and they're not doing anything with it. So you know, I know I went on a bit of a rant here, but like we put so much pressure on our kids today to like that they need to be doing all these like amazing things at like five years old, my God, like what happened to just being kids and like letting them find their path and guiding them gently and making sure that they're okay and that they have all the information that they need to make the best well, you know best educated decisions that they can make.

Speaker 1: 7:38

It's not a race. This is not a race to a finish. This is just living your life every single day. So, the more that we can like pull back a little bit for our children and show them the way that it's not a race, like we just live every day to the best of our ability and do the things that we love the most, because that's really where your success is going to lie. That's really the key message we should be delivering to our kids, not that they have to do you know world-class sports, or they need to do this, or you need to be in the Olympics, or you need to be getting straight A's. Every single you know and you need to. You don't need to do any of it. You have to do what feels right for your soul and what feeds you.

Speaker 1: 8:24

Yeah, this is not, by the way, at all what I had planned on talking to you guys about, but this is sort of where I landed and it kind of came tumbling out as I started the episode, so I wanted to go with it, because that means that somebody listening needed to hear this today. So I've scaled back entirely, completely scaled back, and I am actually super excited about it. Um, I hope that someone listening is hearing this and saying you know what? I'm going to make a choice here and I'm going to choose X. You don't have to go crazy. You just don't Pick a life that suits you to the best. Now, perhaps it suits you to be running around all over the place and that's really like lights you up and and you thrive on that. Do it then. I'm not saying don't do it at all. I'm just saying do what really lights you up. That was like soul-sucking for me. I loved it because I liked to meet other parents, I loved socializing with everybody, but then at the end of the day, I was feeling like really drained and like I hadn't been serving my children the way that I need to be really showing up for them. So this is a personal decision for me, but I want to encourage all of you to make sure that you're making those decisions for yourself.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Thank you for joining me on this episode. I greatly appreciate you. Follow me on social, please, because I'm going to be releasing the schedule of live streams that are going to be coming out. Some of them are two a day, so I want you to really like be able to tap in. They're all going to get campaigned out to the podcast too, so don't worry if you don't. If you miss a live stream, still going to be able to hear it, and you'll be able to watch it on my YouTube channel. Um, I hope you guys are having a great week. Thank you for being here with me and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.