Chapter 12

Imperfect Attendance

It’s the championship match of the Schools’ Challenge, and your kid’s team is behind with one last chance to take the lead. It all comes down to this final question:

“What’s the capital of Mexico?”

Both teams smash their buzzers, but your kid’s thumb is the fastest. Those thousands of hours of video games paid off after all. And to think, your spouse wanted you to buy your kid books.

All your child has to do is answer this one simple question to win the match, the tournament, and everlasting glory. This is a moment they’ll share with their grandchildren. Somebody better take a picture.

Your kid pauses for a second to let the tension build, then proudly blurts out their answer:

“Lima.”

“Uh, no,” says the moderator. The crowd gasps. Your kid gave the capital for Peru. The capital of Mexico is Mexico City. Its founders weren’t very creative at naming things. They were too busy inventing tequila.

As your child stares at the floor in disbelief, the other team buzzes in and wins the match. Your kid’s teammates look away from your child in stunned silence. This is the worst moment of your kid’s life. They embarrassed their friends. They embarrassed their school. They embarrassed themselves.

But they didn’t embarrass you. You weren’t even there.

And THAT is why your kid missed the question.

Not because of their lack of interest in geography or how poorly they do under pressure or those thousands of hours they spent playing Xbox instead of practicing trivia.

No. They lost because of you. You. You. You. You. You.

Sound delusional? Welcome to the mind of an overachieving parent.

Always There for Them

The truth is even if you had been in the audience to support your kid, nothing would have changed. Your child still would have missed the question—unless you gave them the answer telepathically or blinked it to them in Morse code. Maybe next time your kid could just study more. Yeah, that sounds easier.

It’s bad enough that parents enroll their kids in a million activities. But somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for mums and dads to attend those activities, too. That punishes adults and kids alike, but it hasn’t stopped overachieving parents from doing it anyway. Then they complain that they never have free time. It’s almost like there’s a cause-and-effect relationship. Who knows? I’ll leave that one for scientists to figure out.

The Size of Your Child’s Problems

My position on sports also applies to all nonathletic activities: You have to pretend to be on board with your kid’s participation until they wise up and quit on their own. But that doesn’t mean you have to attend every single thing your kid does. Skip your child’s events in the right way at the right times to ensure your presence is felt and your absence is never noticed. Be a ninja of nonattendance. Make an impact and then vanish without a trace.

The Power of Presence

Overachieving parents will never grasp the simple joy of not showing up. They attend every activity their child ever does, except for toilet breaks, and even then there are exceptions. But what about the kid themselves? Do they really want their parents at all six hundred of their weekly events?

Probably.

But not because it helps them in any way. Your kid simply wants to be the center of your attention all the time no matter what. One of the first complete sentences any child learns is “Watch this.” Unfortunately, it takes many more years before they finally do anything worth watching. We’re all born with an attention-whore gene. Some people grow out of it. The rest join social media.

Is giving your child attention really that bad? Yes. It’s literally the worst thing in the world. Better luck next time, raisin cookies. Feeding your child’s insatiable lust for attention will get them hooked on external validation. They’ll do their best, but only if you’re watching from the stands. Otherwise they’ll melt into a puddle of unmotivated failure. The only thing worse than a selfish teammate is a liquid one.

Your presence at an event shouldn’t make your kid perform better or worse. If it does, you have a problem. Actually, your kid has a problem. You just have the kid, which is like having a million problems at once.

It’s best if you can break your child’s attention addiction sooner rather than later. There will come a point when you can’t be present to support your kid even if you want to. You won’t be there to clap during their first job interview or when they ask their boss for a raise or when they propose to their romantic partner. I say “can’t,” but I should amend that to “shouldn’t.” I’m sure some overachieving parent hid in the bushes or behind a water cooler and watched all those events. If you know them, please give them this book.

Supporting your kid unconditionally won’t make them a strong, independent leader; it’ll make them totally dependent on you. What starts with you attending every school competition will end with you and your adult child living together in a creepy house above your murder motel. Never go into business with family.

That’s what your kid can look forward to long term, even if in the short term your child seems to succeed under your loving spectation. Hooked on your attention, your kid will throw themselves passionately into whatever event you’re watching. But you’re not leading them toward future greatness. You’re helping them peak in secondary school. At least murder motels don’t require a degree.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Attending Your Kid’s Different Milestones

Milestone	Pro	Con
Birthday Party	Hard not to attend. It’s in your house.	Equally hard to get out of cleanup.
Making It to County Level in a Competition	Win or lose, you still love your kid.	Win or lose, you wasted your weekend.
Prom	As a chaperone, you can keep your kid safe.	As a chaperone, you’ll be bored, unwanted and sober.
Secondary School Graduation	Ends one life stage.	Starts a more expensive one.
Wedding	You’ll give away your kid.	When the bill comes, you’ll give away your retirement fund.
Job Interview	You’ll show your kid you support them.	You’ll convince the boss not to hire them.
Buying a House	You’ll see your kid grow up before your very eyes.	You’ll have to help them move.

The Upside of Being Ignored

Overachieving parents say they don’t want their kids to be self-centered egomaniacs, but then they turn around and make attending their child’s functions their top priority. A kid with that kind of support can be anything they want—except a tolerable human being. If you want to clear a room fast, let the child of perfect-attendance parents talk about themselves. They’re the best at everything except humility.

Think about the “horrible” lessons your kid might learn if you miss some of their activities:

1. They’re not the center of the universe.

2. They need to respect other people’s schedules.

3. School events aren’t the pinnacle of human achievement.

Someone who learns those lessons is at risk of growing up to be a well-adjusted adult. What would the neighbors think?

A kid’s constant need for affirmation is a different kind of attention deficit disorder. And it’s your focus, not your child’s, that gets called into question. The cure is to wean them off your attention slowly or, better yet, not to get them addicted in the first place. Limit your attendance from the start, and make sure the clubs and sports they join are things they still want to do when you’re not looking. If they spend an entire game in your absence picking grass in the outfield, you don’t have an athlete, but you might have a landscaper. Congratulations, your garden will look amazing.

Amount of Attention Kids Need at Every Age

The Sixth Man

If you skip all your child’s activities, your kid is certain to blame you later in life for their long string of failed relationships. They’re never too young to learn to be flaky. So show up. Sometimes. Depending on how far away the game is and whether or not you have a plausible excuse. Job duties are a valid reason not to go. So is important DIY. Cleaning out your backlog of unwatched shows, not so much. Unless those shows are about job stuff or important DIY. Then you hit the slacker jackpot.

What you can and can’t skip depends on the frequency of the event. If it only happens once or twice a year, you’re stuck. If it happens every weekend, you have some wiggle room. And if it happens every night, you better not attend unless you’re at a truly bad place in your life. At that point, you either love the event or hate yourself. Probably both.

So let’s say the event is pretty frequent. How do you decide which ones to skip?

First, remember nobody is keeping an attendance log for you, not even your kid. Sure, they’ll end up with a general impression of whether you were usually there or not, but in the long run they won’t remember specific events any more than you do. Think about your own childhood. If you were like most kids, you had hundreds of activities you wanted your parents to watch. How many of those do you remember? Probably just the ones where something unusually good or bad happened. Ordinary events with unremarkable outcomes blend into the background. But no one forgets the time they tore a groin muscle at their violin concert. Next time, just take a bow, don’t do the splits.

For parents, there’s no award for perfect attendance. Even if there were, I’d tell you not to go for it. The true prize for a bare minimum parent is extra free time, not a full trophy case. So how do you maximize your visibility at these events while minimizing the time you waste there?

In true bare minimum fashion, I recommend going for quality over quantity. Rather than attending all twenty events in a season, go to the six or seven most important ones. Unless your kid is really bad. Then attend the ones that are likely to be blowouts so the coach will put your kid in the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lopsided win or a crushing loss. If you’re there when your kid gets to play, it counts as good parenting. It also counts if you watch them stay on the bench, but that’s not as special. You can watch them sit around at home.

After one event a year, take your kid out for pizza. That’ll be the event they remember. Food trumps sports. Unless your kid was doing a musical or something. Then food trumps culture.

Try to do this the final game or performance of the season. There’s only one last event each year, so your kid won’t expect special food all the time. If you disregard that advice and take your kid out to eat after a random event in the middle of the season, they’ll ask you to do it all the time. A poorly timed restaurant trip will only make them whine more. If that was your goal, mission accomplished. Celebrate by buying earplugs.

Best Rewards for a Job Well Done

Reward	Pro	Con
Participation Trophy	Kid feels good about themselves.	They shouldn’t.
Trophy They Actually Won	Rewards merit.	Punishes laziness.
Applause	Instant validation.	If your kid doesn’t get it next time, instant disappointment.
Money	Turns your child into a capitalist.	Turns their extracurricular activity into a job.
Time Off Practice	Practice is terrible.	It will seem twice as bad when they finally go back.
A Trip	Promotes experiences over things.	Family vacations are a punishment.
A Nap	Pure bliss.	Only works for adults.
Food	The ultimate incentive.	You could have eaten it yourself.

Even if you convince your kid you were usually in the stands, your work still isn’t done. You also need to convince other parents. I know, I know, I wrote an entire chapter about ignoring parental peer pressure. But in this case, there’s a practical value to making other parents notice you. Unless you plan on committing any crimes. Then stay in the background and keep wearing that fake mustache.

But assuming you’re on the straight and narrow, you need to show up to your kid’s events enough to be recognizable. Not so much that other parents feel like they can come up to you and start a conversation. That would be tragic. But you need to show up enough that other parents know which kid is yours. That cuts down on the likelihood of your child being kidnapped by a stranger. It also prevents some nosy parent from asking your child why you’re never there. You don’t need other parents filling your kid’s head with doubts. Your child will have a lifetime to do that to themselves.

Scheduling Conflict

You can mitigate most of these dilemmas by not signing your kid up for activities in the first place. If you don’t take the initiative and enroll them, chances are they won’t even know an activity exists—at least until years later, when it’s too late for them to start from scratch. The next time you don’t feel like going to a recital, just remember no kid has ever signed themselves up for piano lessons. Your misfortune is self-inflicted. Karma is loud and always misses F sharp.

Exercise this veto of omission with caution. You don’t want your kid to resent you for holding them back. It’s better to let them find out for themselves how much they hate having eight things to attend every night of their lives. It should take about a week. Doing stuff is the worst.

Underbooked

Selectively skipping your kid’s events is good for you and even better for your child. If your child isn’t the center of your attention all the time, they’re less likely to be a social deviant. Breaking the law isn’t as fun if nobody notices. And when all your kid remembers from their extracurricular activities is that one time you bought them deep dish, they won’t have a reason to blame you for all the problems in their life. Faulty memories for the win.

As a bare minimum parent, you can still enjoy sitting in the stands at your kid’s events. Just make sure those activities aren’t the center of your life. A little loving neglect will give your child perspective. The best life lessons are the ones you can teach without leaving home.

But some parents are afraid to let their kid naturally drift away from organized activities. They envision a terrifying future where their child runs amok in their house, unhindered by commitments elsewhere. Fortunately, there’s something that stops your kid from running, amok or otherwise, and you have it in your house right now. No, it’s not a tranquilizer gun (although that works, too). It’s a screen.