The Real Cost of Hobbies

Newsletter 2024-04-07

I encourage my kids to have hobbies. That’s not quite true. When my kids choose to have hobbies, I try not to actively stand in their way. I don’t want them to claim someday that they could have been the next Rembrandt if only their cheap father hadn’t refused to buy them paint. I’m as encouraging as I have to be to avoid being their scapegoat, but I have a price cap. If one of my girls claims they could have been the next Michelangelo if only I had boughten them a chisel and marble, they’re out of luck. If you think restaurant prices are out of control these days, you should see the markup on importing two tons of Italian stone. Recently, I provided modest financial support for my children to pursue three different activities I’ve never tried out myself. (The fourth kid just wants to watch her tablet, which is fine with me. I already pay for Netflix.) I don’t know that any of these new pastimes will lead to lifelong fulfillment or lucrative careers, but they keep my squad entertained for now. Also, supporting them helps me not feel like a dream-stifling monster. My goal everyday is to not be quite the worst parent in the history of the world. It’s a harder threshold to clear than you might think.

The most unexpected request came from my thirteen-year-old, Betsy. One day, she suddenly announced that she wanted to play the violin. Prior to that moment, she had never expressed any interest in the instrument. She didn’t need any band implements. She inherited her mother’s talent for singing. She’s in the most elite eighth grade choir group and was selected to join the exclusive high school song and dance troupe next fall. I thought her own finely tuned vocal cords would be all the musical stimulation she’d need. I was wrong. After Betsy’s request, I checked how much violins cost. I thought they were going to be super expensive. I’ve read articles about a multi-million dollar Stradivarius being stolen or forgotten on a train. That would be one heck of a discovery when somebody empties out the lost and found. I figured the regular kind of violin used by kids must still be expensive. When my eleven-year-old, Mae, decided to play the saxophone, the school tried to charge us $1,500 for her instrument. Off-name-brand versions were still five hundred dollars on Amazon. I went above and beyond in my quest to be the stingiest parent ever and managed to secure a used one for seventy-five dollars on Facebook Marketplace. Mae has been playing it happily ever since. At her current grade and skill level, the instruments aren’t what are holding kids back. A truck could run over every shiny thing in the brass section and the middle school band would sound about the same. When Mae levels up to the point that she’s too good for her bargain basement instrument, I will, of course, buy her a better one. I might even up my price limit to eighty dollars.

I didn’t think I’d be that lucky with a violin. Then I actually checked the prices. “Good” brand new violins were two hundred bucks, and cheap new ones were listed for fifty. For the first time ever, I was shocked in a good way. These weren’t wooden instruments handcrafted by European masters. They’re plasticky composites stamped out of a big machine somewhere, most likely a country without regulations or labor laws. But based on the reviews, they were good enough for an eighth grader teaching themselves how to play from YouTube tutorials. You really just need a box to hold four strings. Anything beyond that is showing off. I ordered Betsy a violin on the spot. I’m not paying for formal lessons. This will be something for her to pick at when she finds gaps in her already overbooked schedule. Maybe this summer she’ll learn to play some basic songs, or perhaps she’ll never touch it again. Either way I’m not out much money. For a modest fee, I get credit for allowing her to pursue her musical dreams, however far she wants to take them. If she doesn’t become a concert violinist, that’s on her. I’m sure many of the soloists in the New York Philharmonic use fifty dollar instruments.

Mae was the next kid who wanted to try something new. I wrote a few weeks ago about how she decided to try out for the tennis team, which isn’t a sport I have any experience with. I figured there was no harm in letting her make the attempt. In the worst case scenario, it would be a valuable learning experience for how to deal with failure and rejection. I got mine the hard way by writing hundreds of thousands of words no one read. Getting the same lesson in two afternoons of hitting a ball over (or not over) a net seemed much more efficient. Well, Mae wasn’t in the mood for learning. She made the team. It helped that there were twenty-four spots and only nineteen girls tried out. She also seems to have a natural aptitude for the sport. That wasn’t how I expected things to turn out. I was thinking of sports like basketball, baseball, and soccer, where kids are on traveling teams from the time they can walk. I see parents spend so much money to turn their kids into scholarship athletes, but apparently tennis isn’t one of those sports around here. It’s a bit too fancy for our rural-ish suburb, so not many kids do it. Mae could also probably make the team for lacrosse or polo, as long as the school provided the horse.

My wife’s boss was a Division One tennis player in college. He tells stories about how he spent all his free time in middle and high school going to private lessons and high-pressure matches around the state. It paid for his degree but made him hate the sport. Now, he never plays. Lola asked him what racket we should buy for Mae. He recommended a few options in the two-hundred dollar range. Lola didn’t get that message to me until I was already on the way back from Walmart with a fifteen-dollar racket Mae picked out herself. She loves it. She’s been playing with it everyday for a few weeks, and so far it’s held up just fine. As with her  seventy-five dollar saxophone, at her current skill level, the equipment is not the limiting factor. When she becomes better, we’ll reevaluate. We’ll never get to the point where I’m taking her to private lessons every night. She’s welcome to learn everything the part time coach at school has to offer. Beyond that, she’s on her own. There’s always YouTube.

My nine-year-old, Lucy, is pursuing the least disruptive hobby of the bunch. It’s not loud, and I don’t have to drive her anywhere on a daily basis. She’s really, really into gardening. I’ve talked about it before, but her green thumb has gone into overdrive ever since it became warm enough for her to plant things outside. Gardening is much funner when the ground isn’t frozen solid. Who knew? Even before spring officially began, Lucy was ready. She planted seeds in starter trays indoors to give them a jump on the season. When we went to Missouri for vacation, she left detailed instructions for the guy checking on our pets to make sure he watered her burgeoning garden. She also took pictures of the backs of all the seed packets she hadn’t been able to plant yet. That way she could scroll through her phone’s gallery and continue reading about them during our trip. When she’s home, she flips through those same packets every morning like she’s reviewing Pokémon cards. She might be a little obsessed. I fully approve. It’s a cheap hobby (at this stage), and it has the potential to make the outside of my house look amazing. I’m all for encouraging the one thing my kids do that isn’t actively destructive.

This weekend, I gave her an even bigger hit of her drug of choice: I took her to a gardening show. She was in heaven. We received a free bush just for walking in the front doors and then bought several packages of seeds for native flowers. We rounded out our haul with a garden trowel and some bulbs for some kind of giant flowering bush thing. I’m not the gardener in the family, so don’t ask me to get too technical. Some of these seeds come with more rules than my board games. The bulbs have to be dug up before it gets cold, whereas the black-eyed Susan seeds have to be put in the fridge for thirty days to simulate going through the winter. These plants are pickier than my kids. They also have more follow-through. If a child doesn’t get something, they might threaten to hold their breath until they pass out, but they can’t actually do it. Seeds can definitely die on purpose if you don’t cave in to their nitpicky demands. It’s the ultimate temper tantrum. I suspect Lucy will be doing exactly what the seeds want, no matter how much work it is for her. And she’ll love every second of it.

After the garden show, we went to a big box hardware store to finish out Lucy’s supply list. She picked out the biggest planter they had in stock to start her own private garden. Instead of a driveway, we have a large parking slab behind our house. It’s a barren eyesore. I would love it if Lucy spruced it up with an eclectic mix of potted flowers. She’s welcome to plant among the landscaping of the front yard as well, but it’s harder there since she has to work around the existing flora. The concrete out back is a blank canvas. Of all the kids trying new things this month, I think Lucy is the one who’s likely to stick with her hobby for the rest of her life. I know many people who garden as adults but very few who play the musical instruments or sports they tested out in middle school. If she one day has a house surrounded by beautiful gardens, I’m going to take a little bit of the credit because I literally helped her get started with my credit card.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time. 

James