Somebody should start learning basic logic.
Let us see. There were 700 families, half of who are paying $1,000 annually, and a quarter who are paying $2,000 annually. Of these, supposedly 9% have more than $5,000 in debt and 27% owe $3,000. The average household expenditures are $60,060 a year, and they are spending $1,000-$2,000 a year on ECs, or about 1.7%-3.3% of the household budget.
To claim that people are in debt because of their kids’ extracurricular activities is to claim that extracurricular activities are a luxury. They are not, because they are part of a kid’s education. All Russians that I knew in Israel paid for their kids to have music lessons, for the instruments, for extra lessons, etc. Israel abounds with extracurricular activities for kids and teens. Neither Russian nor Israeli Universities care about a kid’s extracurricular activities, so nobody is involved in that uniquely American insanity of preparing for college admissions from daycare.
Other highlights of the Market Watch article:
“San Francisco Bay Area mom Vered DeLeeuw figures that she and her husband have spent about $20,000 on extracurricular activities while their daughters (now 17 and 19) were growing up.” Ms. DeLeeuw is a very wealthy professional purveyor of bad nutritional and worse parental advice. She’s one more wealthy mom, complaining about the money she spends to acquire status symbols.
Lets do some arithmetic. Assume that you’re a typical Northern California status obsessed family, and you start your kids on ECs at the age of 2. That would be 16 years of ECs, of which, 15 were for two. That would mean one year of about $650, and 15 years of about $1,300 a year on ECs. According to many interviews, she lives in Silicon valley, where the average home price is over $1.7 million. Her husband has a job as a VP in a high tech company, which generally pays a salary which is well within that of the top 1%. Yet we are supposed to believe that $1,300 a year is a financial burden for them?
Than we have Veronica Hanson, from from Lake Oswego, OR, one of the most affluent suburbs of Portland, which is a pretty costly city itself. She is pretty affluent, based on her assorted web presence. She is not going into debt for her kid’s ECs, and she and her husband are not working overtime just to cover the costs of their kids’ ECs, despite whaty the dumb article claims. They are making pretty good money, and they are budgeting a large chuck for their kids’ education, and good for them. Unlike the former, they are not actually complaining, they are boasting.
The last person, the only actual middle class person of the three, probably only agreed to the interview because her company got some free advertising. They are definitely NOT going into debt over their kids’ ECs, since the article states this very clearly.
So the article makes a claim which it fails to support with data, and supplied three anecdotes which actually demonstrate the exact opposite of the claim.
A major fact which the article totally ignores, is that parents pay for extracurricular activities because these are no longer provided by most schools. K-12 schools have cut art, music, sports, etc. Why? because Baby Boomers all didn’t want to spend money on kids so they voted for tax cuts in education.
So, rather than say that schools should supply art and music, this article tries to make a case that parents who are forced to pay for them from their own pockets are bad because they’re wasting money. Basically another bunch of Baby Boomers who are twisting facts for the sole purpose of justifying their destruction of the education system.
They want to convince parents that it is bad to spend money on things like art and music for their kids, because otherwise parents may figure out that the cheapest way for kids to get things like art and music is by raising taxes to pay for school activities, taxes which the Baby Boomer don’t want to pay. So the article tells parents that they should go as cheaply as possible, or cut ECs entirely, and that it’s better for parents too think primarily about themselves, not their kids, just like the Baby Boomers have always done.
So you have a false narrative, based on sparse facts and a few anecdotes which prove the opposite, all in an attempt to paint their continued selfishness as righteousness.