A Warning for the Modern Indulgent Parent

My eldest son plays in our town’s Little League. He’s no prodigy on the short list for a future MLB contract, but he’s a good player—he understands the game, plays hard, and keeps his cool under pressure. Last summer, he was invited to try out for the local travel team. It wasn’t terribly expensive, so I asked the coach about time commitments. The coach explained that in the spring and fall we could expect practices or games six or seven times per week, with tournaments often on Sundays. Thinking of church (and my sanity), I respectfully declined.

This past spring season, my son secured a spot on the local all-star team (not the same as the Williamsport Little League World Series, if you’re wondering). After several weeks of practice (five days a week!), his team competed in a tournament out of state against a bunch of travel teams. Over that exhausting but fun weekend, I got a real taste of parenting in America’s 21st century, obsessively competitive, youth sports culture. It was a sobering experience.

Travel team players have not only matching uniforms but matching bags, matching helmets, matching everything. Like a battle-hardened military unit, these kids spend practically every day together, and their parents spend a lot of time with each other—driving across state lines for tournaments, booking hotels for overnight stays, and eating and breathing baseball. It’s not just a bit much for a 10-year-old boy; it’s a bit much for a 40-something parent. So, I brought a novel to the tournament to read between innings and games. It provoked some curious looks.

To be parents of six children (as my wife and I are) means managing a shuttle service with a complex schedule of afternoon and evening drop-offs and pickups to various extracurricular activities. Depending on the day and time of year—Nutcracker season is a bear—the last shuttle sometimes doesn’t end until after 9:00 p.m. Somehow, we keep our Sundays clear.

Not so travel sports parents, not so. Every evening, and seemingly many weekends, revolve around athletic activities, often out of town (who cleans these people’s houses or mows their lawns?). They watch their children’s games and talk about their performance as if they are an amalgam of sports agent and personal manager, familiar with the minutiae of their progeny’s statistical performance and aiming for the next competitive “hack.” Is it any wonder most of these kids have no siblings, or maybe one? A parent can only be in one place at a time.

I worry for us parents. I think we can rightly say it’s admirable to give so much of one’s self to a child. Would we rather these moms and dads be drunks or drug addicts, woefully detached from their children who fritter away their youth in front of screens and gorging on processed foods? But all of this seems imbalanced and dangerous to the soul—not just because, as Fr. Joseph Gill recently noted, it keeps people from church, but because it orients the telos, or objective of parenting (and life as a parent) to such a narrow conception of the good life.

Successful parenting, this lifestyle communicates, is maximizing the athletic or academic potential of your child. To “win” is to see your child secure a collegiate scholarship (or, for the favored few, an actual professional contract). Mom and dad, in turn, labor morning, noon, and night to realize that goal, with the periodic Saturday night or holiday vacation to relax with the currently trending low-cal alcoholic beverage. “Personal growth” in this art de vivre is not so much intellectual or moral as it is physical and emotional, necessary to keep body and mind in premier condition (e.g., yoga, Zumba, Pilates, cycling). But our minds (and hearts) were made for more, and to ignore that reality invites not just disappointment but sometimes catastrophe.

The novel I was reading during the baseball tournament—Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain, known for such noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity—turned out to be more apropos to the challenges of contemporary parenting than I realized. The titular character is a young, Southern California housewife whose husband, once a successful realtor, has fallen on hard times during the Depression. Struggling with self-hatred over his inability to provide for the family, he shacks up with another woman, leaving Mildred to find her own way. Through an impressive display of feminine grit and determination, she does, establishing a bakery and chain of greasy-spoon diners that gives her financial autonomy.

The problem, however, is her older daughter, Veda. While possessing her mother’s tenacious work ethic, Veda is also preoccupied with social status. Born into a pedestrian lower-middle-class family, she hopes for more, and Mildred, obsessively desperate to please her, caters to her every whim—paying for new clothes, music lessons, and everything else Veda can imagine. Mildred’s long-term sexual relationship with a man from an established, wealthy family draws Veda into the orbit of the class she aspires to enter; but it also further diminishes Mildred in the eyes of her daughter, who views mom’s culinary businesses as demeaning.

Suffice it to say, things do not turn out well for Mildred. The more she allows herself to become beholden to Veda—hoping it will deepen their relationship and invigorate filial affections—the more Veda snobbishly bristles at a mother who is so demonstrably beneath her and her blossoming musical talent. Sorrow and betrayal are the (perhaps predictable) result.

I’m not saying that the parents who today throw so much of their money and time into their children’s academics, athletics, and other interests will necessarily encounter the tragedy of Mildred Pierce. But the story is cautionary. There is the admirable love of a parent willing to sacrifice and suffer for the welfare of a child and there is the disconcerting affection of a parent that approaches, if not embraces, the idolatrous. Our kids, after all, are not ultimately ours to indulge or even worship. They are God’s, and to Him we will owe an account for them. What do we communicate to our children about what was most important in life, both in how we encouraged them to spend their time and how we spent it ourselves?

Life is more than sports, the arts, or any other authentic good that draws our children’s attention. Yes, we are called to worship God and fulfill our religious obligations under the virtue of justice, and that is reason enough to be wary of any activity that distracts us from our highest calling (Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 81, a. 2). But we are also called to nurture and develop all parts of ourselves, not only the physical but the intellectual and spiritual. It’s hard to do that if life is little more than a mad rat race of school, work, and high-intensity extracurriculars.

What under certain circumstances might be called a component of true leisure—art, music, sport—becomes yet another form of labor and this-worldly striving. And what should be opportunities to grow in virtue are reduced to destructive (and self-destructive) idolatry. For occasions such as this did our Lord warn: “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37).