By: Melinda Wenner Moyer
This piece is part of “The Price of Modern Parenting.” Read about the sandwich generation, caring for aging relatives and out-of-pocket expenses for preterm births.
Raising a kid has never been cheap, but parents a generation ago didn’t have to contend with toddler Mandarin classes, Mommy & Me yoga or preschool chess clubs.
The pressure society places on today’s kids to learn more skills at ever younger ages can feel overwhelming, if not totally bonkers. When my mom signed me up for an after-preschool program in 1981, it involved my being driven in a van to an old church and playing on the playground for a couple of hours. If I signed my kid up for something like that today, other parents might call child protective services.
Often I wonder: How are all these new classes affecting parents’ finances? And do our kids actually need to do all this stuff? Are today’s enrichment classes truly enriching our children, or are we being fleeced by the child-development-industrial-complex?
Parents are spending more
No organization systematically tracks extracurricular costs for young kids. But we can find hints. Research shows that affluent parents spend a lot more on kids’ enrichment activities than they used to. In a 2016 study, Sabino Kornrich, Ph.D., a sociologist at Emory University, analyzed data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a nationally representative survey of spending conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He found that, after adjusting for inflation, wealthy U.S. parents — those in the top 10 percent for household income — tripled the amount of money they spent on child-care and enrichment activities for children under 6 between 1972 and 2010. Spending increases were much smaller in middle- and lower-class households.
This increased spending may be due in part to higher activity costs. In January 2020, for instance, the Boy Scouts of America’s annual membership fee increased by 80 percent, from $33 to $60 a year, largely because of increases in operating costs associated with the group’s liability insurance. Between 2014 and 2018, sports participation fees at U.S. middle schools went up by 20 percent, according to the Huntington Backpack Index, a measure based on school surveys conducted across 26 states and Washington, D.C.
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The other day, I looked at what I paid for a music class with my toddler in Brooklyn in 2012 and compared it to the cost of the same class offered today; the price had gone up by 29 percent, with only 16 percent of that number due to inflation. Of course, overall costs — and cost trends — vary greatly by geography. Everything is more expensive in the big cities, including (if not especially) children’s activities.
In many ways, it makes sense that costs are rising. “The entire structure of what we’re presenting has changed,” said Lauren Barr, the vice president of youth & community development at the YMCA of Greater New York. Parents now expect classes to teach kids special skills, she says, rather than to just let kids play, as in the past.
So organizations have to charge more to cover higher staffing and equipment costs. The same goes for camps: Barr said that interest in specialized options — swim camps, STEM camps, robotics camps, culinary camps and even circus camps — has gone up, while demand for traditional day camps has dropped. And as you might guess, specialty camps are typically a lot pricier.
That said, not all costs are going up. As extracurriculars have become more popular, new programs have popped up, increasing competition. Musicians now offer toddler music classes in public spaces like parks, where they don’t have to deal with rent or other overhead costs, so they can charge less. And businesses like KidPass, for which parents can sign up to explore different kinds of children’s activities, also force programs to keep their prices low.
“I have not been able to raise my prices in many, many, many years,” said Rosanna Magarelli, who since 1993 has been the director of Music Together in the City in Manhattan (which now offers not only regular music classes but also foreign language music classes, including classes in Mandarin). As a result, her business has been struggling.
The race to keep up with other parents
Why are parents so hungry for expensive, specialized enrichment activities? Parents today worry that unless their children are truly exceptional, they’re going to be left behind, said Suniya Luthar, Ph.D., a professor emerita at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Arizona State University who studies well-being in affluent children.
And who can blame us? At the 50 most competitive universities in the United States, admissions rates dropped by 45 percent between 2006 and 2018, from an average of 36 percent of applicants accepted in 2006 to 23 percent in 2018 (for the top 10 universities, the drop was much steeper). It really is harder to succeed nowadays, so of course we’re giving our kids every leg up we can; of course we’re shelling out extra money for robotics camp if we can. “There are these really strong cultural pressures that are real, and these fears are real,” Dr. Luthar said.
The problems with extracurriculars
So do all these activities actually help our kids? It’s hard to tell. It certainly seems as though it would be good for kids to try new things and encounter new challenges. Still, the research is difficult to interpret. Studies have found that kids who participate in extracurriculars earn better grades and are happier than those who don’t. But it’s hard to know whether the activities themselves are responsible for these outcomes, or whether kids who are going to be happy and successful are more likely to participate in extracurriculars.
The research also typically involves school-aged kids, too — not preschoolers or toddlers. No studies have followed kids who’ve done preschool extracurriculars over time to see if they fare any better than kids who don’t.
And if activities seem to provide benefits, it may not be for the reasons we think. “If there’s a primary mechanism by which those kinds of extracurriculars matter, it’s actually in terms of linking parents to other parents,” said Jessica Calarco, Ph.D., a sociologist at Indiana University and the author of “Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.”
While parents watch their kids’ games or dance classes, they strategize and share information in ways that help their kids. They’ll talk about how to get their children into the gifted classes and who the best math tutors are. In a nutshell, extracurriculars are “where parents network with each other,” Dr. Calarco said. The downside: The kids whose parents can’t afford extracurriculars, and who don’t have the opportunity to network in these ways, might be missing out.
Furthermore, the pressure parents put on kids and teens to excel may undermine their mental health. Luthar and others have repeatedly found that older kids in high-achieving schools are more likely to drink alcohol and take illicit drugs than less affluent kids. They are also at an elevated risk for anxiety and depression. Some, including the authors of a 2019 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, have pointed to the constant pressure to succeed as a reason, even citing extracurricular overload as a symptom.
“If your self-esteem is tied to whether or not you’ll make it on all of those very high bars that you’ve set for yourself — or others have set for you — and you don’t make any one or more of them, well then that makes for disappointment and depression,” Dr. Luthar said.
If this sounds like an impossible predicament, I hear you. But I think it’s possible to find a balance. We should feel free to enroll our kids in activities they might benefit from and that they enjoy. But we need to let our kids be kids, too. And more than anything else, we need to make sure our children know that we love them for the people they are, not for the people we hope they will become.
From negotiating family leave to wrangling your budget after baby, visit NYT Parenting for guidance on dealing with work and money as a parent.
Melinda Wenner Moyer is a mom of two and a science journalist who writes for Slate, Mother Jones, Scientific American and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications.