The Cost of False ORs

My youngest daughter was twelve when her elite soccer club called a mandatory parent meeting. The message was straightforward. If your child wants to stay in this program, soccer becomes the only sport. No tennis. No basketball. No outside commitments that compete for time or energy. The choice felt binary. Either she commits fully to soccer, or we leave and accept that she was never really serious.

I pulled her out.

I told myself I was protecting multiplicity. I was defending the principle that young people should not have to amputate parts of themselves to be taken seriously in one domain. That sounded noble at the time. What I was actually doing was accepting a false choice instead of building a better one. I had engineered AND solutions for other families before. I could have done it again. Instead, I taught my daughter that depth and breadth cannot coexist under real pressure. That was wrong.

False choices like that one shape youth development more than most people realize. They rarely arrive announced as ultimatums. They show up dressed as practicality, realism, or responsibility. You can pursue excellence, or you can have balance. You can be serious, or you can keep your options open. You can commit, or you can protect childhood. Most adults do not believe these are ideal choices. They believe they are necessary. That belief is what does the damage.

False ORs appear when systems lack the imagination or patience to hold complexity. They emerge when adults choose simplicity over design. Once accepted, they begin to govern everything quietly. Schedules. Contracts. Expectations. Identities. And the cost does not show up immediately. It shows up years later, when the structure that enforced the choice disappears and the young person has no idea how to recalibrate.

The most common false OR is the one Essay Two dismantled. Commitment or multiplicity. Depth or breadth. Seriousness or a full life. Once that OR is accepted, everything downstream narrows. Not because it has to, but because it becomes easier to manage.

False ORs feel responsible because they reduce uncertainty. They create clarity. They allow adults to say they made a hard choice rather than admitting they avoided a harder one. But clarity achieved through reduction is not the same as clarity achieved through understanding. One simplifies management. The other builds capacity.

The real cost of false ORs is not lost opportunity. It is lost capacity. When young people are forced into binary choices repeatedly, they do not learn how to integrate competing demands. They learn how to comply with constraints. They learn how to optimize for approval. They learn how to perform inside systems rather than how to evaluate them. That difference matters later. A young person who grows up navigating false ORs becomes an adult who believes tradeoffs are always imposed rather than designed. They wait for permission. They look for structures to tell them what matters. When those structures disappear, they struggle because they were never taught how to decide for themselves.

False ORs also distort motivation. When a child is told that choosing one thing requires abandoning others, the activity stops being a pursuit and becomes a defense. Identity collapses into a single lane. Pressure increases not because standards are high, but because escape routes have been closed. Adults often misread this pressure as evidence of seriousness. In reality, it is evidence of fragility. A system that cannot tolerate multiplicity produces people who cannot tolerate change.

This is where regret begins to surface, though it rarely sounds like anger. It sounds like confusion. Why does this feel empty. Why am I lost. Why was I so good at following instructions but so bad at choosing what comes next. The young person who was managed through false ORs was never taught how to manage themselves.

False ORs also teach the wrong lesson about sacrifice. They frame sacrifice as elimination rather than prioritization. They suggest that being serious requires giving things up permanently rather than managing them deliberately. That belief follows people into adulthood, where it shows up as imbalance, resentment, or avoidance of commitment altogether. The irony is that most adults who enforce false ORs believe they are protecting children from regret. In practice, they are simply delaying it.

I had a student years ago named ReeRee Li. I worked with her from the first ball she ever hit at age seven until I left Charlotte when she was thirteen. What came later, including her captaincy of the Yale tennis team, was not the result of continued supervision but of standards she learned how to carry forward. She did not get there by narrowing her life into a single lane. She got there by learning how to carry standards across multiple contexts without abandoning any of them. Tennis and academics. Competition and community. Depth and breadth. Those were not contradictions in her development. They were the conditions under which judgment formed.

The alternative to false ORs is not indulgence. It is architecture. When adults refuse false ORs, they accept responsibility for building environments that can hold tension. Education and athletics. Passion and discipline. Depth and breadth. These are not contradictions. They are design challenges. Designing for AND is harder. It requires patience. It requires communication. It requires adults to tolerate messiness and ambiguity rather than hiding behind rules that simplify their own lives. But environments that support AND do something false ORs never can. They teach young people how to weigh competing values without abandoning themselves.

This is where the skill of judgment forms. Judgment is not knowing the right answer. It is knowing how to decide when there are no clean answers. False ORs remove the need for judgment by pretending clean answers exist. AND environments demand judgment because they force tradeoffs without collapsing identity. A young person who learns to carry multiple serious commitments learns something profound. They learn that tension is not a problem to eliminate. It is a condition to manage. That lesson transfers everywhere.

In 2007, I created a program called the Peggy B. Evans Youth Development Program. It lasted one year before I left Charlotte for Texas. The program tried to integrate tennis, academics, and enrichment in a single environment. It was an attempt to refuse the false OR between athletic development and everything else that makes a person complete. The program was not perfect. It was short-lived. But it proved something important. When adults design for AND instead of accepting OR, young people learn how to be serious without becoming narrow. They learn how to commit without foreclosing their options. They learn how to hold standards across multiple domains instead of protecting a single identity at all costs.

False ORs also quietly reshape how adults evaluate success. When systems enforce binary choices, outcomes become the only visible justification. If the sacrifice was total, the result better be worth it. This outcome pressure distorts development further, pushing systems to chase short-term wins rather than long-term capacity. The cost shows up later, when success no longer arrives on schedule and the young person does not know how to recalibrate because they never had to learn.

Youth development does not fail because young people are unwilling to work. It fails because adults too often choose simplification over stewardship. False ORs are the mechanism by which that simplification spreads. Eliminating false ORs does not mean avoiding difficult choices. It means making them honestly. It means recognizing when a tradeoff is real and when it has been artificially imposed by a system unwilling to do the harder work of design.

This essay is not asking adults to promise that everything is possible. It is asking them to stop pretending that false limits are wisdom. Depth does not require narrowing life into a single lane. Commitment does not require abandonment. Seriousness does not require identity foreclosure. These ORs are not developmental truths. They are administrative conveniences.

When adults accept that distinction, something shifts. Decisions slow down. Conversations change. Young people are no longer asked to amputate parts of themselves in order to be taken seriously. The false choice between depth and breadth dissolves. What remains is the harder but more honest work of designing environments where both can coexist. That is the cost of refusing false ORs. And that is the cost young people pay when adults continue to accept them.