I hear what you're saying, but for the kids who don't have active parents willing to fight these battles, they pretty much just don't do any activities. In the

I hear what you're saying, but for the kids who don't have active parents willing to fight these battles, they pretty much just don't do any activities. In the short term, their lives are actually arguably better. They have more time to devote to homework, fewer obligations. Later on, their prospects for college and scholarships may not be as good, depending on what else they do. But at least in the short term, having disinterested parents sort of just means you get to have a comfortable childhood. It's really quite sad that there is such fierce downward pressure to begin the processes of employment competition and mate selection at younger and younger ages that we end up bottomlessly compromising away our children's ability to stop and enjoy life for a few years. If the downward pressure led to more well-adjusted, gainfully employed adults who benefited from the early crucibles, then I might be somewhat OK with it. But while parents are busy with the downward pressure, society is also busy making sure the kids can only get a job in some shitty start-up where they'll be lucky to have adequate health insurance, let alone ever having enough money to afford a standard of living that we collectively view as acceptable. Conditioned upon the inevitable shit-world that executives and political elites thrust upon us, if we really loved our kids we should probably teach them to value foosball tables and extroverted work spaces above all else. Then we'd at least prepare them for the real world.