Kids sports cost how much????

 

I don’t know about you, but I want the best for my kids. Maybe you do to? Even if you don’t have kids, you probably know a parent, and if you think they may benefit from this email, please forward it to them!

 

Recently, we decided that we were going to enroll our boys in football – the American version. My husband was an All-Star soccer player, so I was surprised that he picked football over soccer for our boys. But I was excited because if you know anything about me, you know I love me some SEC football!

 

Seriously, football is the only sport that I could realistically hold a conversation about because it’s the only sport that has ever interested me. So I was thrilled at the idea of my boys playing football and me getting to be a cheerleader on the sidelines cheering on my boys.

 

So when registration opened up, I was all ready. I mean, I had been stalking the local football organization’s Facebook page for weeks in anticipation. I was ready and had money set aside ready to register my boys for fall.

 

 

But, when registration opened up, and I saw just how much money it was going to cost us to enroll both of our boys in football for the fall, I nearly choked on my coffee!

 

To register them was going to close to $600 and that didn’t include the camp that my boys were going to need since they’ve never played football before and it didn’t include their cleats or helmets!

 

 

That was wayyyyy more than we were expecting but we wanted to be “good” parents. Not to mention one of our children has been diagnosed as having ADHD, and it has been recommended to us that we put him in sports. We felt like we needed to put our kids in sports.

 

For weeks, I kept trying to make room in our budget to set aside the money to pay for my boys to play football. But it wasn’t happening due to taxes, an escrow account shortage, and us still needing to put gutters on our house.

 

 

So we started talking about enrolling them in a different sport. But once again we found ourselves realizing that it was going to still costs us a pretty penny to enroll our boys in sports.

 

And heck, we weren’t even sure if they would like to play the sport we were considering enrolling them in! The thing is, we simply didn’t have the cash to make it happen. And if we wanted to make it happen, we were going to have to make some really tough decisions.

 

So after a long night talking it over, we decided not to enroll our boys in sports for the year but to start putting money aside so if next year they want to play a sport we’ll have the money to pay.

 

I wish this internal battle stopped here – with us not being able to afford it – but it didn’t. For weeks we felt like bad parents and like our kids were going to suffer because they weren’t in sports. We worried about them feeling left out and like they were lacking.

 

 

I’ve talked to several parents who have expressed the same thing. We’ve had friends rack up thousands of dollars on their credit cards in sports fees, travel costs, and the like. I’ve hugged moms who sat crying because they were exhausted from trying to keep up with the pressures of keeping up with the “sport” mentality.

 

I used to think that parents that spent so much on kids’ sports and wreck themselves over pushing their kids in sports had lost their minds. I mean, to my childless self it seemed insane but a simple problem of “if you can’t afford it, you can’t buy it.” But when is life ever that simple?

 

I share this with you because maybe you’ve found yourself in a similar spot – perhaps not with kids’ sports but the pressures of keeping up with the pressures of raising perfect kids. And if you have found yourself in this spot, I want to encourage you that you’re not alone and that it is entirely okay to say “no.”

 

 

Yes, your children may be sad when you tell them “no” but if your kids are old enough, maybe give them the opportunity to pay for the expense themselves. It’ll teach them the value of saving and how much the sport means to them. One of the most significant blessings my parents ever gave me is that they didn’t sugar coat it when it came to affording things.

 

They would straight up tell us they couldn’t afford it but if we wanted it bad enough, we could pay for it. It helped my brother, and I understand that money was a real thing and not something imaginary and that things cost money.