Latest / Mom's Money / Your Kid's Activities Aren't Expenses. They're Bets.

Transcript

Your Kid's Activities Aren't Expenses. They're Bets. · Mom's Money

• 0:00
  Your kids' activities aren't expenses, they're bets. I don't think your kids' soccer fees are an expense, or piano, or tutoring, or summer camp, karate, or dance. I think they're bets.
• 0:15
  And I think moms should stop asking only, "Can we afford this?" And start asking a much better question, "What are we actually buying?"
• 0:27
  Because sometimes $300 for an activity is expensive, and sometimes 3,000 is cheap. It depends on what that money is building. This is Mom's Money Talk. I'm Ellie Ezra, the mom talking money like no one ever did for you.
• 0:46
  This is for the woman who's done managing money and ready to run her life like a business. I'm not a financial advisor, but I've built companies, sat in rooms with investors, and learned how money actually works.
• 0:58
  And here's the truth. You don't have a money problem. You have a systems problem. This isn't about budgeting harder or cutting lattes.
• 1:07
  It's about spending with intention, building assets, and thinking like the CFO of your household. Because if you're a mom, you're already running a business, the business of the home.
• 1:18
  So I'm giving you the playbook, one that makes your life feel lighter, not heavier. We are going to stop treating household money like a pile of bills and start treating it like capital.
• 1:31
  I believe moms are already making hundreds of allocation decisions every month. The problem is we're rarely taught to think of them that way, and kids' activities are one of the best examples.
• 1:46
  Honestly, the default question is too small. Parents look at an activity and ask, "How much does it cost?" And that's reasonable, but it's incomplete. Because price tells you what leaves the account.
• 1:59
  It doesn't tell you what comes back into the family. Maybe you're buying confidence. Maybe you're buying discipline. Maybe you're buying a skill. Maybe you're buying community.
• 2:11
  Maybe you're buying three hours a week where your child is doing something hard instead of scrolling. Maybe you're buying childcare. Maybe you're buying exposure to a world your child would never otherwise see.
• 2:26
  Maybe you're buying joy. My hope is that it's all of this, and resilience too. And yes, sometimes you're buying absolutely nothing except a packed calendar and a stressed out mother. That's the point.
• 2:41
  So the bet framework. A business doesn't invest because something is cheap. It invests because it believes the capital will create value.
• 2:52
  I think parents can use the same lens without turning childhood into a spreadsheet. When I'm looking at an activity, I wanna know four things. One, what are we betting this builds?
• 3:06
  Like, the research on music-based activities says it changes their brain. Best believe those piano lessons are worth every penny. Two, does the child actually want the thing we're buying?
• 3:19
  Even though my son has lost every soccer game he's played, he wants it. Plus, let's do this, buddy. There's no other way to understand the agony of defeat than through a team of uncontrollable outcomes.
• 3:32
  I will pay for that drive so he could feel it all. Three, what does it cost beyond money? Honestly, if it's not convenient for me, sorry, kids, but it's not happening.
• 3:44
  I had a friend drive 200 miles for kids' sports in a weekend. I'm not that person. For them, that's their weekend. For me, I am building in convenience and recovery. It cannot cost more than I can bear.
• 3:56
  Personally, I know myself, and if I burn out on this, everyone suffers. And four, is there a better way to get the same return? What else do we wanna instill that works for the whole family? All of us. We are a team.
• 4:11
  We are in this together. So what are we betting this builds? Take karate, for instance. Maybe I'm not really paying for karate.
• 4:20
  Maybe I'm paying for confidence, physical competence, discipline, and the experience of being bad at something long enough to get better. I have also paid for this since my son was five, and he's eight.
• 4:32
  You know what he learned? His address, phone number, parents' names, and how to yell, "Stranger," if someone tries to grab him. It also built commitment. He has shown up every Sunday for years.
• 4:44
  We make a commitment, we keep it. It's very different than what it says on the invoice. Or piano. The idea is spend on purpose. I'm not putting my kid in piano because I'm expecting her to become a concert pianist.
• 5:00
  That's not really the ROI. I'm buying exposure to something that requires her brain to listen, sequence, coordinate, practice, fail, repeat, and improve.
• 5:13
  And music gives you an activity where the developmental payoff is remarkably tangible.
• 5:20
  A longitudinal USC study followed children starting around age six to seven, comparing kids receiving music training with kids playing sports and kids receiving neither.
• 5:32
  After two years, the music-trained children showed accelerated development of auditory processing and brain responses to musical sound.
• 5:43
  Importantly, researchers had tested the groups beforehand, so these weren't simply kids who'd started with superior musical brains. Another longitudinal study followed children for four years.
• 5:56
  After several years of music training, the music group showed advantages in some measures of inhibitory control, basically the brain's ability to suppress an automatic response, pay attention, and regulate behavior.
• 6:11
  And differences In the neural networks involved in those skills.
• 6:17
  And a randomized study of a hundred and forty-seven children averaging about six and a half years old, they were followed for two and a half years, it found music education was associated with improvements in planning, inhibition,
• 6:32
  and verbal intelligence compared with visual arts and control groups.
• 6:37
  So maybe the bet isn't that my kid becomes that concert pianist, but learning an instrument actually changes how the developing brain processes information.
• 6:48
  So maybe I'm buying the experience of practice, frustration, pattern recognition, and performing in front of people, or maybe I'm buying long-term independence, resilience, and processing.
• 7:05
  You know, a week where my child has to function without me solving problems. These are assets, human assets. Okay, so do the kids actually want the return? So here's where parents can get weird.
• 7:18
  We decide an activity is good for them, and suddenly we're spending thousands of dollars dragging a miserable child somewhere three nights a week. At some point, the bet changed.
• 7:27
  Now you're not investing in the kid, you're investing in your own attachment to the idea of the kid.
• 7:32
  Your kid's activities can absolutely be investments, but an activity stops being an investment when the parent is optimizing for an imaginary future payoff instead of the child in front of them.
• 7:45
  That doesn't mean children never have to stick with anything hard. Of course they do. It's part of the lesson. Quitting the second something feels uncomfortable, that teaches nothing.
• 7:53
  But there's a difference between resistance and total misalignment. A good investor updates the thesis when the evidence changes. Parents should too.
• 8:04
  Your job isn't to predict which seven-year-old activity will become your kid's career. Your job is to intelligently fund enough experience to let them discover who they are. And there's a hidden cost.
• 8:22
  This is the part almost no activity budget captures. The fee is not the full cost.
• 8:27
  The full cost might be registration, uniform, equipment, travel, dinner in the car, Saturday, your spouse's Saturday, the sibling who gets dragged along, the hour of driving each direction,
• 8:42
  the mental load of remembering where the shin guards are. The hundred and eighty dollar activity may actually be consuming forty hours of family capacity across the family.
• 8:52
  That doesn't automatically make it a bad bet, but we should count the real capital we're deploying. And sports, sports are generally very good for kids.
• 9:01
  So a major twenty twenty-six systemic review covering a hundred and eighty-nine studies found youth sports participation was associated with better self-esteem,
• 9:13
  life satisfaction, psychological well-being, social skills, and belonging. Interestingly, team sports showed stronger and more consistent psychological and social benefits than individual sports.
• 9:28
  And individual sports can absolutely build self-confidence and self-reliance, personal accountability, and self-efficacy. The athlete can't blame the shortstop when she misses the vault or loses the match, right?
• 9:41
  But recent research also finds individual sport athletes can experience more self-blame after failure, less built-in social support than team athletes.
• 9:51
  And a twenty twenty-four review found relatively higher rates of anxiety, depression, and even eating disorder symptoms among individual sport athletes compared with team sport athletes.
• 10:02
  So different activities by different developmental returns. Now, my kids still did swimming, an individual and lifelong sport, and it's safety, so. Money is only one form of capital. Time is capital.
• 10:17
  Attention is capital. Energy is capital. Family peace is capital. Moms know this intuitively because we're usually the ones paying the invisible portion of the bill.
• 10:30
  And then there's the status trap, and sometimes this is the uncomfortable one. We're not buying development at all. We're buying social proof. Everybody else's kid is in club soccer. Everybody's doing travel baseball.
• 10:45
  Everybody's paying for the tutor, and everyone is putting their kid in three camps, so we do it too. Then we're exhausted, the kid's exhausted, and nobody can explain what we're trying to build.
• 10:58
  That's not capital allocation. That's keeping up with the Joneses in shin guards. I'm not interested in spending family resources just because another family did.
• 11:09
  The question is, does this serve our kid and our household? The cheapest option isn't always the smart one. This works in the other direction too.
• 11:19
  Sometimes moms talk themselves out of something valuable because the number looks big.
• 11:24
  But if a fifteen hundred dollar experience changes how your kid sees themselves, introduces them to a lifelong skill, creates a relationship, opens a door, or gives them confidence they carry for years, that might be an incredible use of money.
• 11:41
  I'm not telling you to spend recklessly on children. I'm telling you to stop assuming frugal always means smart. When I call kids' activities bets instead of expenses, it don't mean spend without limits.
• 11:56
  Investors don't put unlimited capital into every company either. They make a thesis. They watch what happens.
• 12:04
  They double down where there's traction, and they stop funding things that aren't producing the return they wanted. Spend smart means understanding what the spending is supposed to produce.
• 12:18
  So I like to actually think about it like a portfolio. Childhood as a portfolio. Not every bet needs to pay off. Some activities will flop. Great. Your kid tries violin and hates it.
• 12:34
  They do one season of basketball and decide it's not for them. They take an art class and fall completely in love with it. This is information.
• 12:43
  We don't need every dollar spent on childhood to produce some perfect measurable ROI. Karate might buy confidence, discipline, individual accountability.
• 12:54
  Soccer might buy cooperation, friendship, learning how to function inside a group. Piano might buy auditory processing, executive function, and persistence.
• 13:04
  Dance might buy body awareness, performance confidence, and discipline. You're building a portfolio, not trying to manufacture a prodigy. But I do want the portfolio to reflect our values.
• 13:19
  We just have to be careful with sports. The newest American Academy of Pediatrics clinical report on this came out in 2024.
• 13:28
  Their warning isn't sports are bad, it's that training load with enough-- without enough recovery creates problems. Problems.
• 13:36
  Overtraining can increase injury and illness risk, hurt performance, and contribute to burnout.
• 13:43
  Another finding, kids whose ratio of organized sports to free play that was greater than two to one had a higher risk of overuse injury. There is such a thing as putting too much capital into one asset.
• 13:57
  And in August 2026, the Wall Street Journal profiled Norway's completely different youth sports system.
• 14:07
  Norway delays talent sorting until about 13, encourages multi-sport participation, minimizes travel, and emphasizes enjoyment and long-term participation rather than turning childhood sports into a miniature professional league.
• 14:23
  The example is spectacular. Erling Haaland's childhood club had about 40 boys. 35 remained in soccer into adulthood. Six became professionals, and one became Erling Haaland.
• 14:38
  America's model says if your kid has talent, turn the dial to 11. Travel further, spend more, specialize earlier. Norway basically said, "Calm the fuck down. Let them play." And somehow they still made Erling Haaland.
• 14:52
  America's model says if your kid has talent, turn it up and just do more.
• 14:58
  But if you're spending $15,000 a year on travel sports because your financial thesis is that eventually this child is going to get a college scholarship, I need you to understand something.
• 15:11
  The NCAA itself says only about 2% of high school athletes get an athletic scholarship, and most athletic scholarships aren't full rides.
• 15:21
  Doesn't mean travel sports is a bad investment, but it makes college scholarship a bad investment thesis. I stand by this. If the kid loves it, they're gaining confidence.
• 15:33
  If this is where their friends are, if they're learning discipline, if they're becoming strong, if your family genuinely loves spending weekends at tournaments, great. That's the return.
• 15:44
  Don't manufacture a fake financial ROI to justify it. If you're spending $1,200 a month for 10 years chasing a scholarship, that's $144,000 out of pocket. Invest at a hypothetical 7% instead, that's about $208,000.
• 16:01
  At 8%, it's $220,000. You don't need your 11-year-old to earn a scholarship. You can literally fund the college. If what you're actually trying to do is pay for college, start a fucking 529 plan, okay?
• 16:15
  If your kid happens to become talented enough to get a scholarship, fantastic, okay? That's the upside. It never was the investment thesis. Please stop.
• 16:25
  If the goal is college money, we have the financial instruments for that. They're called 529 plans. Your child does not have to work a second job beginning at age nine so you don't have to fund college.
• 16:38
  Look, ask the right questions. Are we exposing them to physical challenges? Creative things? Different people? Independence? Teamwork skills? Unstructured time? And yes, unstructured time belongs in the portfolio too.
• 16:54
  Let's be honest, mothers, we need this too. Why would we think those little bodies don't need it? It has to be part of the plan. This is what the research says. You do not have to allocate every hour of a child's life.
• 17:06
  Sometimes the highest return investment is leaving Tuesday night open. So here's the question for moms. The next time a registration email lands in your inbox, don't immediately ask, "Can we afford it?"
• 17:19
  Ask, "What are we buying? What do we hope this builds? What will it really cost the household? Does this particular kid want or need that return?" And if the answer is good, spend the money without guilt.
• 17:36
  If the answer is weak, say no without guilt. That's the whole idea. Money is not moral. Spending more doesn't make you a better mother, and spending less doesn't make you a smarter one. The job is allocation.
• 17:51
  Your household has limited capital. Use it to build what matters. Sometimes that's an index fund. Sometimes it's paying down debt.
• 18:02
  Sometimes it's buying back your time, and sometimes it's a ridiculous-looking karate uniform on an eight-year-old who's learning he can do hard things. That's why I don't think kids' activities are just expenses.
• 18:17
  They're bets. Make them on purpose. Stop budgeting your life away. Start building something that pays you back. The goal isn't to save money. It's to build a life that money can support. Spend smart. Acquire assets.
• 18:32
  I'm Ellie Ezra. I'll see you next time. [outro music]