Stories We Tell Through Activities We Do
It is hardly surprising that I have devoted a great deal of time and energy in my professional career to encouraging parents to be present with the child right in front of them rather than being overly focused on the future.
– Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies, or “Fat Envelopes”
Establishing an extracurricular activity around here can feel a lot like wedding planning: you start off with a relatively simple idea of what you might like, only to get to the point where you have to have exactly that kind of flower arrangement or color of chair (and we planned our wedding before Pinterest was around). It’s almost impossible not to get sucked in. You start off thinking it might be nice for your kid to do a sport for exercise, and end up obsessed by why they got wait-listed for the team everyone else is trying to get their kids into. You begin to wonder what this will mean for their future, and what you can do to change things, what other team or class you can look into to give them a leg up. A simple hope and well-intentioned exploration has morphed into a litany of anxieties, uncertainties, comparative value statements, and logistical struggles.
On one hand, this is a conglomeration of everything our particular class culture has made extracurricular activities to be. They are the beginning of a supposed road to external achievement and success (high-stakes and visible), yet tainted by enough uncertainty to lay you open for all kinds of anxiety (will your kid even still be doing this in a few years?). They exist at an intensity that involves a paralyzing number of options (activity, level, teacher) and high cost expenditures (money, time, gear acquisition, opportunity cost). And it’s all layered over with a heavy dose of self-deterministic optimization (it’s up to you to figure it out for your kid).
No wonder it’s so hard to maintain perspective and integrity of purpose.
Saturated in this culture long enough, I begin to hope for a particular kind of storyline for my children, one not unlike the stories teenagers like to write these days. Many of them are variations of the same fantasy-inspired coming-of-age tale in which the main character, who begins as an unremarkable and/or unpopular figure, discovers that they possess untapped (often magical) powers. They uncover an alternate world of reality in which they play a significant role in cosmic struggles. Admittedly, this storyline has been told and retold (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Keeper of the Lost Cities) for a reason: it offers the meaning and identity that teens (and ultimately all of us) are searching for. We all want to believe we are special, and need only look inside ourselves to find it.
Sometimes we try to play out this storyline through our kids’ activities. We start early, secretly hoping that our (otherwise unremarkable) child will encounter an activity that reveals special talents they possess, securing them a unique identity (best at a particular skill) which then lands them a guaranteed path to a meaningful life (college entrance! the Olympics!). We come to put a particular kind of pressure on our kids: yeah, this is kind of for fun, but also wouldn’t it be nice if you happened to be good at it, and worked really hard at it, and got better than everyone else, so you can fulfill the dreams I secretly have for your life?
“God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
The Bible tells a different story, one that switches around the order of things. In this story, we are special not because of something about us, but because of who we are loved by. We discover our identity not by doing or becoming something on our own, but by discovering more about this love and what it means to return and enjoy it in our own ways. This story promises not the elusive and shifting success our culture espouses, but a kind of joy and meaning independent of circumstance. It’s the difference between Harold Abrahams, running to justify his existence, and Eric Liddell, running to feel God’s pleasure, able to forgo a medal to keep his integrity.
What would this story have to say about my kids’ extracurricular activities? They would be part of loving God by keeping well what he has put in my care, by helping them explore new worlds and enjoy more aspects of who God made them to be. They might be good arenas for learning character skills and building healthy friendships. But I don’t think they would be so outcomes-focused. I don’t think there would be such narrow, external, temporal, or even quantifiable definitions of success. And this is good for me to remember, for it is disturbingly easy to functionally slip back into the predominant narratives of our culture.
