Ever since David Brooks coined the term “Organization Kid,” our culture has had a suspicion that we’re probably doing something wrong by over-scheduling children. And yet, the culture of high-commitment sports and dance is flourishing. Even conservatives have gone after it for the way it warps the rhythms of family life or makes an idol of hobbies and avocations. There’s a suspicion that wealthier parents are walling themselves off with these expensive and time-consuming passions.

Helen Andrews, the editor of Commonplace, a journal put out by American Compass, asked me to take the conversation one step further. I found that, without even trying, my family was getting sucked into this life and we were . . . happier for it:

Although our situation was in some ways sui generis, the loss of trust in suburban neighborhoods is general, and political polarization is part of the cause. Anyone following the parenting-trend literature now knows that sleepovers, so common in my childhood, are just gone. Parents simply don’t trust other households. Will they remember his peanut allergy? Do they have porn blockers on their internet? Do they have guns in the house? Do we agree about trans issues?
We felt alienated from our own neighborhood until my daughter became a dance kid. Time spent at the studio, and in the shared frustrations of the high-commitment life, revealed to us who our neighbors really were. We discovered at the studio two families who lived just one block away, and one of the dads, like me, was getting into golf. The other dad coaches travel baseball and has a boy who is willing to teach my younger sons a thing or two. It was through high-commitment kids that we finally found the neighborhood houses to call on, except we rarely had to, because the girls were at the studio anyway.

Read the whole thing here.