This time of year, there are tons of memes highlighting the hustle and bustle of being a parent after school starts. It’s time to sign up for football games, join the Girl Scouts, and host a PTA bake sale. Now is the time when dinner is served at 4pm or 9pm because you’ve been competing in gymnastics all evening. It’s meme after meme about how our kids’ extracurricular activities are essentially akin to second jobs, and then well-intentioned Instagram accounts and TikTok influencers share how, actuallythey don’t sign up for activities outside of school and work because actually Cherish their family time.
I get it.
But I hate that we try to force family connections into a box. As much as I hate that the word “self-care” has become synonymous with “if you’re not living in a hotel room by yourself every month, you’re doing it wrong,” family relationships don’t have to exist only in families. Or on board games. I firmly believe that family connections can be found anytime and anywhere—when your kids are taking a bath, when you tuck them in at night, on the drive to school.
What works for one family won’t always work for another, but that’s just how it should be. Different personalities, different dynamics, different priorities – it all means each family has to choose what’s best for them.
For my family of five, extracurricular activities really help our family bond. Soccer practice, tap dance lessons, early morning choir clubs, piano lessons – when we describe our week to inactive families or childless friends, we hear a loud groan: “This sucks.” “That sounds like a lot. it yes a lot of. But some of our sweetest moments come from this routine. Let our girls share all their thoughts in the car. Walked quietly to the fields without interruption, where they told us what happened at school. Instead of trying to tackle the pot, air fryer, and dish at the same time at a drive-thru dinner, I can speech to them and listen.
My husband coaches our two older daughters’ soccer teams, which means we spend a lot of time on the soccer field each week. As the girls watched each other practice, as I chased their little sister around the grass, and as we all walked back to our pickup truck, my husband told them how proud he was of their work and how proud he was of each of them. Give specific praise for something they did and I can feel the glow. Like a health bar in a video game, our family connection pulses: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
We left the field and headed to the McDonald’s drive-thru, where we prepared Happy Meals for our girls, then took them home and talked while they ate, bathed, and got ready for bed. We snuggle with them and end our day with stories and reminders to pass the ball with the inside of their feet and make sure not to take it too seriously when someone steals the ball from you. We kissed them goodnight and went downstairs where I cleaned their football gear and my husband ordered us dinner so we could have a quiet at-home date night.
Some nights our girls have to be in different places at the same time, so my husband and I divide and conquer. We took turns dragging one person to tap while the other watched from the porch as a daughter walked toward the piano teacher’s house. But those tiny commutes—driving to dance, walking home from the piano—are full of connections. Everyone goes home at the same time and shares their favorite part of the day. I set the table for dinner, my 5 year old showed me her tap dance, my 10 year old played the piano to show us her new skills, and the toddler was running around us, very Be happy with all the busyness of the day.
I can think of so many top mom moments – you know. when everything is just Employed. The kids were happy, the atmosphere was great, and there’s a little core memory that slides down the track in your brain and you just know you need to take a little more time to absorb everything that happened. Many of our mom moments happen during our busiest, most worrying days of the week. Like coming home from football practice and everyone rolling down the windows so we could scream Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers.” Or when we’re on our way to run errands and everyone is grumpy and it suddenly clears up and pours and we all have to run to the car screaming and laughing.
And Bing Bing Bing. ❤️❤️❤️
That’s not to say a low-key, zero-plan Saturday can’t make us glow. There is nothing I love more than showing my girls how to play card games on a rainy football morning and putting cinnamon rolls in the oven while we all eat our veggies on the couch with the Harry Potter movies playing in the background.
But that’s because family connections are everywhere. This is not an either/or question. If your family works best with keeping a lighter schedule and fewer commitments, then I’m happy for you.
I’ll grab some McDonald’s for you on the way home from soccer.
Samantha Darby is the Senior Lifestyle Editor of Romper and Scary Mommy, a PTA Soccer Mom, and raising three little women with her husband in suburban Georgia. Her pickup truck was always being totaled.
