Is a child’s hobby worth spending a small fortune on if the child prioritizes socializing with their friends over mastering the respective skill?
This woman has an eight-year-old daughter, and she spends around $8,000 a year for her to dance competitively. They’re middle-class and have three kids in total, so $8,000 is no small sum for their family.
Her daughter’s plan is to be able to dance more competitively next year, which will cost her even more money. However, she’s happy to support her daughter dancing, since she adores it.
So what exactly is the problem? Well, her daughter’s friend is not on the same level as she is, so her daughter said she would prefer to downgrade and be on a worse team to be able to stay with her friend.
She thinks the price of dance is too insane to condone her daughter downgrading, because it’s going to be the same price for her to compete; it won’t be cheaper.
Two years ago, dance was more of a hobby than a competition, and all the kids were more interested in having a good time than honing their skills.
“She loves dance, and I am all for paying and supporting her, but if she’s in a class where the teacher is going to be spending most of her time trying to get younger kids to focus, I just don’t want to be shelling out $8-10k a year for her to not improve and most likely backtrack,” she explained.
“I told my daughter she can choose to not compete, or compete in one dance instead of five, and just take a few non-competitive classes, or we can even switch studios if she doesn’t feel like she’s making enough friends.”
She did have a chat with her daughter about how we have to make hard calls in life and cannot always do something in order to stick with our friends.
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She reassured her daughter that she didn’t need to keep on competing if she didn’t feel like it, but her daughter said no, she wants to be in just as many competitions at the lower level.
She really is not interested in paying a small fortune since her daughter will not be improving, and the team she’s moving to is a whole lot worse than the one she’s on right now.
“I am all for spending money on supporting her passions, but am conflicted, spending that much money to have her on a lower team, because I feel like if it was really her passion, she wouldn’t care about who was on the team,” she continued.
“But I also don’t want to be like ‘no, you can’t dance as much competitively because it’s too expensive,’ and make her feel like her interests aren’t worth a certain amount of money.”
She’s wondering what she should do, considering she would have $80,000 in the bank she could use to send her daughter to college at this rate if she no longer competed.
I think she should reframe the conversation here and tell her daughter she can stay at the level she is at (without her friend), or she can find a more recreational style dance class (with her friend).
Spending $8,000 for her daughter to dance on a team that isn’t even great is completely crazy to me. I mean, it’s also insane to me that she’s paying that much for her daughter to be dancing where she is at the moment!
That’s just a wild sum of money to spend on a kid’s hobby, and if her daughter was planning on making this a career, well, that would be a different story.
It does appear that her daughter only cares about dancing with her friend, because if she was exclusively passionate about dance, it wouldn’t matter to her if her friend was on her same team or not.
And that’s all fine…it’s just not worth $8,000.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
