With the World Cup on, I've been thinking about all the parents currently spending $3,500 to $7,000 a year on travel league soccer, dreaming their child might one day wear the national team jersey. Some elite club families are spending $8,000 to $15,000 a year once you add tournament travel, hotels, and private training.
Watching Messi's heirs battle it out on TV is a powerful drug for a sports parent's imagination. Holy moly, what an incredible come back Argentina had against Egypt!
Here's the sobering statistic every parent should know before writing those checks: according to the NCAA, only about 2% of high school athletes receive an athletic scholarship of any kind to compete in college. Most of those scholarships are partial, not full rides.
Full rides go to roughly 1% of athletes, concentrated in football and basketball. If your child joins a youth sports club with 100 kids, statistically only one or two of them will ever see scholarship money, and it probably won't cover much.
When To Quit?
So when do you keep spending money on your kids' lessons and activities, and when do you stop?
I was speaking to a mom the other day who was wrestling with exactly this question. Her daughter takes ballet lessons at $100 a session, is only somewhat interested, and the mom knew, based on her daughter's size and skill progression so far, that she would never be competitive. Should she keep paying?
After going through my own version of this dilemma with parkour ($150/lesson for two for six months), I've developed a framework to help you decide. Because if you don't have a framework, you'll either quit too early on something your child loves, or keep funding a hobby out of guilt and sunk cost long after the returns have vanished.
You Can Spend An Infinite Amount Of Money On Your Kids
For anybody who wants to decumulate wealth, buying a larger house you don't need or a nicer car is one way. But the single greatest wealth decumulation machine ever invented is children. Since kids are novices at everything, the menu of things you can spend money on is essentially endless:
- Singing lessons
- Dance lessons
- Sports lessons and travel leagues
- Language lessons
- Music lessons
- Acting lessons
- Tutoring and test prep
- School aftercare
- Private grade school
- Sleepaway camps
- Vacation travel
- 529 plan contributions
- College, private or public
- Graduate school
- A car
- A wedding
- A house down payment
You can literally spend every dollar you have on your children if you so choose, and plenty of parents effectively do. Therefore, we need a decision framework for when to keep going and when to stop and reallocate.
The two main variables are Joy and Mastery. The third is Money.
Variable #1: Joy
If your child loves the activity, then by all means continue, even if they aren't very good. The goal is to cultivate joy so intense that they become obsessed on their own. Only when a child is self-motivated to practice will they ever have a chance at becoming great. No amount of parental nagging has ever produced a world-class violinist who also likes their parents.
Seeing our children joyful is priceless. If we can give our children a joyful childhood full of movement, music, friendship, and challenge, then I dare say we've done our jobs as parents.
So the first test is simple: does your child light up before the lesson, or do you have to drag them into the car like a hostage negotiation? If it's the latter for months on end, joy has left the building, and your money should too.
Variable #2: Mastery
The second reason to keep spending is if your child is clearly a top performer for their age. If they're in the top 25% and improving, keep investing, because talent plus reps compounds just like money does.
The hard part is being objective about your own child, since every parent's default setting is delusion. To counteract this, triangulate with data:
- Teacher and coach feedback, ideally unsolicited
- Feedback from other parents who have no incentive to flatter you
- Your own observations against similar-aged kids
- Statistical results, e.g. your child scored in the top 10% of all goals in the league, or won their age bracket at a regional tournament
As parents, our responsibility is to introduce our children to as many activities as reasonably possible. What a shame it would be to never introduce a child with wonderful hand-eye coordination to golf or tennis. If not golf, maybe it's singing. If not singing, perhaps it's soccer, pickleball, coding, or acting. We never know until we let them try. Breadth first, then depth once joy or mastery reveals itself.
If an activity has neither joy nor mastery, that's your signal to stop paying and redirect the time and money elsewhere. The ballet mom's answer was hiding in plain sight: some interest, no trajectory toward excellence, $100 a session. Wind it down gracefully and go find the next experiment.
Don't Be A Delusional Tiger Parent
Here's the uncomfortable truth about reaching the college and professional level: it requires two things, and you as a parent control neither. First, your child must be genetically gifted. Second, your child must be so obsessed with the sport that they willingly practice and suffer on their own, without being asked. Not one or the other. Both.
A genetically gifted kid who has to be dragged to practice will get passed by the obsessed grinder. An obsessed grinder without the physical gifts will hit a wall in high school when puberty redistributes the talent pool. And a parent's ambition substitutes for neither. You cannot want it for them.
So watch for the tell. Does your child shoot hoops in the driveway when nobody's watching? Do they ask to go hit balls? Do they watch film of their sport for fun? That self-directed obsession is the only fuel that gets anyone to the elite level.
If it's not there, no amount of travel league tuition will install it. Relax, let them enjoy the game, and save yourself $40,000 and a strained relationship.
Variable #3: Money, And How Much To Budget
Although we could spend infinite money on our children, we should budget a reasonable amount each year. Otherwise, we risk damaging our own financial security, which ironically undermines our long-term ability to provide for them. The airplane oxygen mask rule applies to family finances too.
Here are three ways to tether your kids' activities spending:
1) Percentage of income: 2% to 5% per year. If your household income is $100,000, budget $2,000 to $5,000 a year for lessons and activities. If you earn $300,000, that's $6,000 to $15,000.
2) Percentage of net worth: 1% to 2% per year. If your household net worth is $1 million, consider budgeting $10,000 to $20,000 a year. This method works well for FIRE folks with high net worth but modest income.
3) Percentage of investment gains: 10% per year. If your $500,000 portfolio gains 10%, or $50,000, allocate $5,000 to kids' activities. In down years, you spend from the prior year's unspent surplus or scale back to the basics.
The reality is that wealth buys more opportunities for children. Any unspent money rolls over to the following year. The point isn't to hit the budget. The point is to have one, so a persuasive travel league director can't guilt you into financial decisions at a parents' meeting.
A Real Financial Example: The Travel Soccer Math
Let's run the numbers on the classic scenario playing out in millions of households during this World Cup summer.
Say your 13-year-old makes a travel soccer team. All-in costs, including club dues, tournament fees, uniforms, hotels, gas, and the obligatory post-game meals, run about $5,000 a year, which is right in the middle of the typical $2,600 to $10,500 range for travel soccer. You commit from age 10 through 18, so eight years.
Total cash outlay: $40,000.
Now the opportunity cost. If you instead invested that $5,000 a year into an S&P 500 index fund earning a historical 8% average annual return, after eight years you'd have roughly $53,000. Leave that $53,000 untouched to compound at 8% until your child turns 40, and it grows to approximately $290,000. That's a house down payment in most of America, funded entirely by skipping travel soccer.
Compare that to the expected value of the scholarship path. Your child has roughly a 2% chance of receiving any athletic scholarship. NCAA Division I and II schools award almost $4 billion in athletic scholarships to more than 196,000 student-athletes, which works out to an average of about $20,000 per athlete per year, and most awards are partial.
So the expected scholarship value is approximately 2% times $20,000 times four years, or about $1,600. You are spending $40,000 in real money to chase $1,600 in expected scholarship value. Not a great ROI.
Then there's the opportunity cost of all the time away on weekends. And what if you have other children who aren't into the sport? Money is just one cost.
This math only condemns the decision if the scholarship is the reason you're doing it. If your child is joyful, fit, learning teamwork, staying off screens, and building friendships and discipline, then $5,000 a year may be a phenomenal investment in their development.
Joy and mastery justify the spend. A lottery-ticket college funding strategy does not. If college funding is the actual goal, a boring 529 plan beats a travel league 98 times out of 100.
The Danger Of Deciding To Teach Your Own Children
If you're a stay-at-home parent, you may opt to teach your children yourself. You save money, build a stronger relationship, and experience the deep satisfaction of watching them improve under your guidance. When our kids are young, we're better than them at everything, so basic skills like swimming and riding a bicycle are easy wins, even for non-expert parents.
Beyond the basics, we should teach the things we're genuinely good at. For me, that's tennis, pickleball, softball, golf, and poker, though my wife has vetoed the poker curriculum until they're at least 10. Teach your strengths and see what sticks.
However, there's a real risk to being the coach, which I recently discovered with some disappointment.
For 18 months, I taught my kids forehands and backhands in tennis. I tossed balls to each side and refined their strokes, session after session, probably 40-plus lessons in year one alone. Tennis technique is one of those things that's extremely hard to fix later in life if learned wrong, unlike pickleball, which forgives almost everyone. After a year, I saw real improvement in their swings, so I kept doing exactly what I'd always done.
Then in year two, they played some mini tennis at a school fair with a professional coach, and reality hit me like an overhead smash. They couldn't control the ball or sustain a rally with a partner.
All this time, I had failed to incorporate actual rallying into our sessions. I'd also skipped footwork drills that build movement and anticipation. So my kids can hit a beautiful backhand off a parent-tossed ball, a skill in high demand exactly nowhere, but in live play they looked like complete beginners.
Learn How To Be A Good Coach
I felt like I'd wasted over a year of lessons, and honestly, somewhat defeated. The lesson: if you plan to coach your own children, do extensive due diligence on how professionals structure a progression of lessons. Being good at a sport and being good at teaching a sport are two different skills, which is obvious in hindsight and invisible in the moment.
Then again, maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Perhaps my kids are doing just fine for their age group. All I know is they're way ahead of where I was at ages 6 and 9, since I didn't pick up a racket until around 11, and things turned out fine. Perspective helps. But so would a few sessions with a professional coach, which we're going to start doing soon.
Consider a hybrid model: professional instruction for technique and structure, parent practice for reps and bonding.
The Real Goal: Sports For An Entire Lifetime
Here's the reframe that makes all this spending rational again. The long-term goal of paying for your kids' sports lessons isn't a scholarship or a pro contract. It's to help them get good enough to play sports for their entire lifetime.
A child who becomes a competent tennis, pickleball, or golf player at 14 has just acquired an asset that pays dividends for the next 70 years. These are the great lifetime sports with built-in communities in every city on Earth.
Think about what lifetime sports competence actually buys:
Health. Regular play keeps you fit for decades without the misery of a treadmill. The best exercise program is the one disguised as fun, and no one has ever needed motivation to play a third set.
Community and friendship. Every tennis club, golf course, and pickleball court is a ready-made social network. As an adult, making new friends gets progressively harder. Sports remain one of the few reliable friendship machines past age 30.
Serendipity for business and love. I can't count the number of business relationships and investment opportunities that have originated on a tennis court. Sports put you in repeated, relaxed contact with interesting people, which is the exact recipe for serendipity.
Joy, forever. The kid who learns to love playing at 8 becomes the 60-year-old who still looks forward to Saturday morning matches. That is the actual return on investment.
Instead of building athletes, build future adults who can walk onto any court in the world and immediately have a health plan, a social life, and a shot at serendipity. That's worth every penny, and it requires zero scholarships to pay off.
Questions and Suggestions
Readers, how do you decide when to stop paying for your kids' lessons and activities? Have you ever kept funding an activity out of sunk cost or scholarship dreams? Which lifetime sports have paid the biggest dividends in your own health, friendships, business, or love life?
I explore how to raise resilient kids and invest in their future without sabotaging your own in my upcoming book, Your Children Will Be OK: Helping Them Navigate An Uncertain Future (Portfolio Penguin, 2027). In the meantime, grab a copy of my USA Today bestseller Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps To Seven Figures to build the wealth that funds all those lessons.
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