I have local friends whose daughters are driven to learn many different things. (I know the friends through my daughter's club soccer team.) One day we had a co

I have local friends whose daughters are driven to learn many different things. (I know the friends through my daughter's club soccer team.) One day we had a conversation about the eventual era of self-driving cars, and I commented that it would be a convenience to be able to put my daughter in a self-driving car to go to soccer practice. A mother involved in the conversation DREADED that prospect, saying, "If I didn't have to drive my daughter, I wouldn't be able to say to her that she has to limit her activities. She would get in the car with her cello and go right from soccer practice to cello practice, and never have any down time." I hadn't thought of it that way before, but that's right. Sometimes I say no to my daughter not on the rationale of "that would make you too busy" but rather on the rationale of "I haven't got time to drive you to that once a week." Some ambitious kids could lose free time altogether if the cars drive themselves. EDIT TO REPLY TO FIRST TWO REPLIES: One of you has said you are not a parent, and I'm asked in the other reply about free time being time to decide what you want. I acknowledge that both concerns are valid. In other words I agree that if my chief rationale for telling my own daughter that she shouldn't sign up for a sports program is that she will be overtired and risk injury besides, that is the reason to lead off with in conversation. (What parents usually find in parenting is that many parenting decisions are overdetermined, being grounded in multiple rationales, but children also think their desires have multiple rationales, and parents and children have conversations with a lot of serve-and-volley about rationales for decisions.) Similarly, if "we can't afford it" is the fact, rather than just an excuse, I would say that. We cherish honesty in our family--and, honestly, sometimes the reason we don't consider other activities for our children is that we would be run ragged driving them around. Children have desires that go beyond their ability to estimate the costs and benefits of pursuing those desires. (Yeah, adults do too, but this limitation in planning and self-assessment is a big part of the basis for distinguishing between adults and minors.) When my daughter is pursuing her own schedule with her own money, I am sure she will continue to delight in challenging herself and keeping busy. Today, sometimes, as the adult in the room my job is to say, "Remember that time we signed up for [name of activity] and then you found out you were too busy to keep doing that?" We let her try out a lot of things, but sometimes we just have to say, "You need sleep, and you need daytime rest, and for your own development sometimes you need just to sit and think and not do structured things all day." The girls I meet through my daughter's soccer team are all high-ambition girls who push themselves academically (several are in full-time foreign language immersion school programs) and athletically (they are in the top team in our soccer club for their age group) and in other domains. We parents are all proud of them, but we know sometimes we are doing best by our children when we tell them to take a break.