My Complicated Relationship with “Intensive Parenting:” Confessions of a Soccer Mom

Last week, my 9^th grader showed us an article in her school newspaper featuring one of her elementary classmates. This fellow ninth grader earned the distinction of an article spotlighting him because he is a freshman playing on the highly ranked and competitive varsity boys soccer team. My 10-year-old soccer player’s eyes got real big and he started asking lots of questions.

He wasn’t the only one riveted by the news. I found myself wondering what this prodigy’s soccer pathway had been and how it compared to my son’s. Just a few days later, my son’s team played in a tournament and a “pre-E64” team annihilated them in the first game. (In case you’re scratching your head, I don’t know either – I had never heard of this E64 thing.) For the second time that week, my brain started spinning about my son’s soccer future. I realized I’m completely ignorant about youth soccer and I have no idea how to help set up my child for his best soccer future.

Do you see where I’m going with this? I may talk a good game about not being an intensive parent while I get sucked into it just like everyone else. When I say intensive parent in this context, I mean curating my child’s athletic opportunities so he will excel. It feels gross even typing this for the world to read and know that I’m having this impulse.

But here’s why it matters and why I’m exposing myself: intensive parenting has become an adaptation to our current environment. We are often doing it for complicated and understandable reasons that aren’t about us at all.

What’s In a Name?

We throw around the term a lot in the parenting space, but here’s the definition coined by Hays in 1986 originally describing what she called “intensive mothering:” “child-rearing methods that are child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.”

In an upcoming episode for my podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock,¹ there’s a brief debate between two highly accomplished parenting scientists about the concept of intensive parenting. Based on decades of experience, child development researcher,

Ellen Galinsky

, views the idea of intensive parenting as the current form of parent shaming and blaming like all the ones that have come before (e.g., remember the Mommy Wars?). Alternately, psychologist/neuroscientist/health tech entrepreneur,

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

, experiences the concept as liberating because it explains why we feel the way we do as parents today.

I agree with both of them.

Naming intensive parenting as a cultural force shaping how we parent takes away at least some self-blame. However, the idea of “intensive parenting” isn’t serving us as well as it could if we resort to using it as another way of telling parents they are not “doing parenting” right. As with all parenting labels, the very phrase places the onus on the parent. The truth is that external forces well outside of our individual choices encourage an intensive parenting mindset and practices. It’s not us failing at parenting.

As someone who has long held up intensive parenting as a cultural phenomenon that we should question and resist, I have also come to see how it’s complicated. In my role as “soccer mom,” I have lived the paradox of being philosophically against a way of parenting while also viscerally feeling and understanding its pull. That’s what I’m here to confess to today.

The Confessional

My son is my youngest child, my only boy, and has lived up to the third child hype as upending our idea that we had mastered this parenting thing with his older sisters. He contains multitudes. Being his mother contains multitudes.

Part of his genetic design is singular focus, which can be quite maddening. But in soccer, it’s a huge asset as he zeroes in on repetitive skills practice, constantly dribbling a ball around our downstairs floor. He has boundless energy that he must expend, or he can’t fall asleep at bedtime. The days he has soccer, I always know he’ll sleep better. His moods can take us on wild rides (better as he’s getting older but still part of his wiring) but when he has spent more of his week playing soccer, he’s more even keel. More content. Twice now, he has returned home from overnight weekend soccer tournaments and not even asked to play Fortnite in contrast to his typical daily habit.

In short, playing soccer fills a lot of my son’s physical, emotional, and social needs, and I want to preserve that for him. I don’t want him to lose this thing that matters tremendously to him and adds so much value to his life and identity. More precisely, I don’t want to be the reason he loses this thing because I didn’t parent “intensively” enough.

And. He’s ten years old. With the state of youth sports these days, this seems to be when *&it gets real. He’s starting to talk about things like “academy” and scouts. It might be because he’s ravenously consuming The Academy book series, but it’s also more in his air now. He knows of a seventh grader who travels to Dubai to play soccer; my son starts middle school next year.

Here's where the cultural norms and pressures influence making choices as a parent. To be clear: I’m not aiming to raise a twelve-year-old international soccer phenom; I’m not even eyeing soccer in college! But it feels like for my son to even be able to keep playing at the level he enjoys, we can’t just sit back and let it happen.

Here’s why:

• If I miss something, he’ll miss out. When I found out there was this E64 thing, I realized how little I know. Which could mean I miss an important rung on the soccer ladder. This fear aligns with one drive underlying intensive parenting: economic and educational data show that our children’s futures are less secure than they used to be.² There are fewer spots in colleges and fewer jobs with certain upward mobility. So, parents feel more anxious about equipping their children for a future characterized by more scarcity than in past generations. I want my child to play soccer at a competitive level for as many years as he wants to play, but will he be able to if I miss sending him to a certain summer training camp? Will he fall behind his peers? This is a common pressure point of intensive parenting: it feels like there aren’t enough “spots,” whether that’s in a competitive sports league or in the college admissions process.

• He’s talented, but he’s not a star. I absolutely love watching my son play.³ He’s killer on defense, always seeming to get the ball out of the morass of feet battling for possession. He’s finally venturing into offensive positions and holding his own. But he’s not that kid scoring goal after goal, clearly the team star. However, that may be one of my favorite parts about his team: there’s no standout superstar; the star on the field is their chemistry and how they work together. Not once have I seen or heard a player scold their teammate after a botched play (I have seen it countless times on opposing teams). THIS is the team culture I want for my son. The downside is I really have no barometer for how my adorable #33 stacks up in this universe of youth soccer. I could see his whole team roster playing in high school, but with another local and much larger travel league training four times the number of kids that are on his team, there just aren’t enough spots (back to the scarcity problem).

• Balancing inspiration with pressure. When a rec league (American Youth Soccer Organization) soccer coach suggested my son try out for “club” soccer when he was 8, ambivalence twisted me up. I didn’t want to place pressure on something my child loved. I didn’t want to risk his joy for the promise of excelling. I hesitantly brought up the possibility of tryouts with my son, and he unequivocally wanted to go for it.

  He is in his second year playing with this organization and now I can’t imagine him not playing at this level. It has turned out that joining this team has thoroughly enriched his life; it has not just made him a better soccer player, but more confident and happier on a daily basis.

  This is an example of how resisting “intensive parenting” is not black and white. I could have rigidly stuck with my ideals of not feeding into the competitive youth sports culture by keeping my son in the lower pressure rec league, and he would have missed out on what has proven to be the best fit for him.

  But this balance is like walking on a tightrope. As we proceed one year at a time on his soccer journey, what if my attempts to secure his soccer future backfire and he loses the spark because I get caught up and push too hard?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What to Think About, Intensive Parenting or Not

Here’s what I take from my personal encounter with what to do about being or not being “an intensive parent:”

1. It’s all about the right fit for the child. My son thrives with higher competition; it feeds his love of the game. For some children, they would wilt under this type of pressure (um, that was me as a young athlete) and it would squash their joy. I learned I shouldn’t have assumed a more competitive environment would be inherently negative for my child. Rather than getting caught up in keeping up with the competition, though, stay connected with the goodness of fit of the environment with your child.

2. Stay focused on motivation. Is your child continuing an activity because they still enjoy it or because they think it makes other people happy? For now, my son appears clearly self-driven, coming home from a game and kicking goals in the backyard for another 45 minutes. He can’t get enough. However, if that starts to change, we need to let ourselves see it.⁴ Keeping your eye on what’s intrinsically driving your child can help counterbalance the impulse to exert too much external pressure. For example, if a child starts to feel sick in sync with performance, or starts complaining more about the activity, you should probably do a motivation check. What our kids love can change.

3. Keep this question close: “What is it all for?” How would advancing through the most competitive soccer leagues actually benefit my son and his future? We recently googled, “average salary for professional soccer player in Illinois.” I have no confidence the results are valid, but they stunned me: $35,000 for men; $14,000 for women (enter sexism into the discussion). We need to keep perspective on where soccer fits in life. If he sacrifices too much in his youth for the sake of soccer, does he lose out on other opportunities to develop as a well-balanced person? He was shocked to learn the other day that it’s possible to play soccer in college, so I’m glad the whole D1 concept hasn’t even entered his consciousness. But it will. When it does, I want to be a source of perspective rather than tunnel vision that leads to regret when he doesn’t become the next Lionel Messi.⁵

Two Thousand Words

Did I just write 2,000 words about my child playing soccer?⁶ That feels kind of embarrassing. Hopefully, though, this long-winded soccer mom confession helps embody the intensive parenting dilemma: we may not want to be engaging in parenting methods that are “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive,” but we might have to in order to adapt to modern realities.

I want us to understand the constellation of factors so we can ditch feeling badly about ourselves, while simultaneously making choices grounded in what’s best for our child’s well-being, whether that includes some “intensive parenting” or not.

Do you relate? Is there a part of parenting where “intensive” works for you and your child? Do you know what E64is? I want to hear your thoughts!

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In parenting solidarity,

Emily

1. We’ve recorded a groundbreaking conversation about tech, kids, and mental health to come out on 11/20 so get your podcast feed ready! The intensive parenting part was a bit of a tangent, but also important context for the current stress around parenting and technology.

2. NYT finance writer, Ron Lieber, shares and explains this data in his excellent book, The Price You Pay for College.

3. Btw, that is exactly the only thing you are supposed to say to your kid after a game: “I love watching you play.” See Footnote #5 for just one place this sage advice comes from.

4. Based on data, chances are it will change: age 13 is now the average age for dropping out of a sport, likely because competition is more intense than it used to be.

5. I highly recommend

Kirsten Jones

’, Raising Empowered Athletes, for a great resource to help parents maintain perspective.

6. I did. The word count landed at exactly 2000 words.