This year I started saying no.
No to the spirit week that needed a crazy-hair day, a decades day, and a costume sourced by Thursday.
No to the fourth birthday party this month—the one for a kid mine has mentioned exactly once (and possibly not even once because there are so many Jaydens.)
No to the Venmo request for the group gift, the extra optional practice that everyone treats as mandatory, the fundraiser where my actual job is to harass relatives.
I know how this sounds. And let me beat you to it: yes, part of this is just that no adult on earth wants to spend Saturday at a trampoline park. I’m not pretending there’s no laziness in the mix. There is. I’ve met me.
But if it were just that, it wouldn’t follow me around the way it does.
Because the no’s don’t feel like relief. They feel like confessions. Every one comes with a little spike of guilt, a flicker of what kind of parent skips this—and it’s that flicker, not the trampoline park, that finally got me asking what exactly we’ve all signed up for.
Every single yes is reasonable—that’s the trap
Here’s what makes this so hard to push back on: no individual ask is the problem.
The spirit week is cute. The fundraiser is for a genuinely good cause. The extra practice really would help her swing. The birthday kid really would love to see my son there. Each request, examined on its own, is small, kind, and completely defensible.
Which is exactly why there’s never a place to draw the line. You can’t reject any single one without feeling petty, so the line never gets drawn at all. And a hundred small reasonable yeses quietly compound into a family schedule that nobody ever actually chose.
I’ve started to suspect every parent I know is privately drowning in the same math. We’re all in a race nobody remembers entering, where the only thing scarier than burning out is being the family that didn’t keep up.
So everyone keeps up. Including, for years, us.
“The best” always quietly turns into “the most”
Somewhere along the way I noticed the mechanism underneath it, and I haven’t been able to unsee it.
We all say we want to give our kids the best. But watch what that actually means in practice, and “the best” always collapses into “the most.” Another sport. Voice lessons on top of the sport. The travel team instead of the rec team. More enrichment, more exposure, more.
Why does it always run in that direction? Because more is measurable, and stopping is not.
Adding an activity feels like an act of love you can point to. There it is, on the calendar, proof. Declining one offers nothing to hold up. Worse—it forces you to sit with the most uncomfortable truth in all of parenting, the one the whole machine is built to help us avoid:
Saying no is hard because it requires you to admit that much of developing a kid is out of your control.
That’s the engine. The over-scheduling isn’t really devotion. It’s anxiety management dressed as devotion. Every yes buys a small hit of “I did everything I could”—and an entire culture of parenting has organized itself around pouring ever more hours into kids than any generation before us, not because the evidence demanded it, but because the pouring is the only part we can see ourselves doing.
The no’s don’t deprive the kid. They deprive the parent—of the comforting illusion that enough effort guarantees the outcome.
We did to childhood what we did to ourselves
The pattern looked familiar, and eventually I figured out why.
It’s the same thing we did to our own adult lives. We eliminated every attention gap—the walk without a podcast, the meal without a screen, the line without a phone—and called it productivity. Then we turned around and eliminated every unscheduled hour of childhood and called it opportunity.
Same disease, both times: complexity added relentlessly, with nobody ever stopping to ask whether anyone could absorb it.
The boredom we engineered out of our kids’ weeks was doing something, the same way our own empty moments were. The aimless Saturday, the unstructured afternoon, the long stretch of nothing where a kid has to figure out what to do with himself—that wasn’t a gap in their development waiting to be filled.
It was part of the development. We just couldn’t measure it, so we paved over it.
The asks didn’t get heavier. The ground under them disappeared.
And here’s the part I want to be careful with, because it isn’t anyone’s fault, and pretending it is would miss the point.
Most of this volunteer-parent infrastructure—the crafted costumes, the class-party signups, the mid-morning everything—was designed in an era when nearly every household had a full-time adult at home running logistics. That was the quiet assumption the whole template was built on.
That household is now the exception. Parents poured into the workforce, total family working hours climbed, and yet the research shows we’re somehow also spending more hours on our kids than parents did in 1965—mothers more, fathers nearly triple. The expectation structure never got renegotiated when the world changed underneath it. The new demands just got stacked on top of the old ones.
So no, parents didn’t get softer. The math stopped working. And everyone is politely pretending it didn’t.
The spirit-week email isn’t heavier than it was in 1995. It’s just landing on a household that already spent its last reserves before the email arrived.
What I’m actually saying no to
I want to be precise here, because this is the part I got wrong for years.
I’m not saying no to my kids. I’m saying no to a metric. The one that says love is provable by accumulation—that the visible yes is worth more than the invisible margin, that a packed calendar is evidence of caring and an empty Saturday is evidence of neglect.
That metric was never measuring love. It was measuring compliance with a standard nobody ever agreed to and no family was built to sustain.
My kids don’t need the fourth activity. They need a parent who isn’t running on fumes by Thursday. They need the empty Saturday—probably more than they need anything it would have been filled with. And they need to grow up watching at least one adult decline something without treating it as a moral failure, because someday the asks will come for them too.
None of this has made the guilt disappear. The flicker still shows up with every no, and I’ve stopped expecting it to retire. I just stopped obeying it.
I still go to plenty of birthday parties. I still do some of the spirit days—the ones my kid actually cares about, which, it turns out, is a much shorter list than the flyer suggests.
I just stopped believing the ones I skip are evidence of anything.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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