Across America, most children participate in some activity outside of school. Youth sports, where American families spend about $40 billion a year, is an example but musical lessons, dance lessons, and other activities are also included in the kinds of things parents use to fill their children’s time. Some families throw their lives into these things as they coordinate their careers around driving children to practices every day after school and spending whole weekends traveling hours away from home to competitions and showcases. Those travels can come at great expense and there are additional costs related to training and equipment. With that being said, it’s no surprise that these activities can become intertwined with the very fabric of a young person’s identity.
This can be especially true for a student who excels locally at a sport or other talent. Perhaps early on there are hopes of grandeur, but the truth is that very few of us can make a living off of the activities that we invest so much of our childhood in. Often this truth slowly becomes increasingly apparent as childhood wanes and high school graduation approaches. Navigating the emotional toll of that requires a special touch.
This realization can be tough on parents as well. That can be especially true for parents who felt like the investments they made in their children’s activities would pay off in the form of college scholarships. However, few are the gross number of scholarships available at all colleges and universities nationwide in “non-revenue” activities such as diving, gymnastics, or playing the violin to name a few examples. Even in big revenue sports like football, only Division 1 colleges and universities award true athletic scholarships and those are reserved for very elite athletes. Ultimately, the number of people who are able to leverage their childhood activity into paying for all or most of their college expenses is very small compared to the number of people who participate in those activities.
By junior year, many students and parents will start to figure out that they’re probably not going to participate in the Olympics or be signing with an agent. After all that hard work, maybe they’re just a pretty decent high school soccer player and that’s the end of it. Still, there might be little soccer balls or something on everything in a young person’s room and everything they seem to know about who they are is somehow stamped with soccer. A family might find themselves asking how can this person exist without that personal brand. Therefore, they might convince themselves that they need to move twelve states away to some town they’ve never heard of and play for a tiny college that offers them a glorified coupon in the form of an $8,000 academic scholarship even though tuition is $65,000 a year.
No, you don’t have to do that. It’s okay for you to lay these dreams down. You can still be a worthwhile person if your childhood activity is no longer a leading part of your everyday life. Whatever that activity was, it can still be a hobby for you. You can find outlets to dabble in it. It just doesn’t have to define you anymore. The time, money, and effort you spent on it wasn’t a waste if you don’t go all-pro. It will always be an important part of your childhood, and certainly there were good lessons and discipline that came from it. However, those activities don’t have to be central to your adulthood. Parents and new young adults, it’s okay to think about college and a life beyond that doesn’t include your childhood activities.
