Parents: When you’re eating a ham sandwich on the soccer sidelines at 3 p.m., is it time to reevaluate your life?

Welcome to May-cember, my friends, the month in which parents relinquish all earthly responsibilities to spend more hours than a five-star Uber driver in their car or else idle in grim middle school gyms, holding iPhones in the air like lighters at a Phish concert, scouring for reliable Wi-Fi.

“I have a hard time understanding how sports trump sleep and health. Full stop,” says Arlington’s Dana Lynne Varga, a mom of two neurodivergent elementary schoolers. Both play spring sports. The games start late and run long, upending dinner and crucial downtime.

“I expressed my frustration with the late start times for games for kids so young and was met with lots of camaraderie and a lot of ‘get over it.’ … The late games are a huge lift,” she says.

Her kids’ routines are disrupted; everyone is grouchy. She understands that many coaches are volunteers who can’t arrive until evening — they double as working parents! — but this means that games seem to finish when bars close. She‘s reconsidering her kids’ participation in certain sports because it’s untenable.

What’s going on here? Do kids with extracurriculars belong to a leisure class of parents with ultra-flexible jobs — or no jobs at all — with infinite time to chauffeur, cheer, and coach? Don’t the Sports Gods know that people work?

“In my town, it feels like [sports are] social hour for parents who have too much free time: It’s a battle of judgment on both sides, which is so unfair and ultimately makes kids feel like they aren’t as supported as other kids. I think youth sports organizations need to better support families,” says one Freetown parent.

Organized sports are increasingly becoming the realm of the well-off, with parents who can afford to pay hefty club fees and maintain autonomous schedules.

A recent study of US sports participation over the last 60 years from Ohio State University found a significant increase in kids playing organized sports, particularly among more privileged, educated families.

The study found that about 70 percent of Americans born in the ’90s, reaching age 18 by 2015-16, said they took part in organized sports through recreational, school, or club teams, while slightly more than half of those born in the ’50s reported participating in organized youth sports.

However: For kids born in the ’50s, there were few class differences in who played organized sports. For kids born in the ’90s, the share of those who played organized sports were 24 percentage points higher when they had a college-educated parent. The average family paid $883 annually for one child‘s primary sport in 2022, according to Project Play by the Aspen Institute.

“For most of us who are single parents, poverty, a lack of time, an always messy home, a lack of support in emergencies, and loneliness is enough of a burden. We don’t need the responsibility of providing more play and activity as well to keep our kids at a baseline level of health. The ironic thing is that most schools have plenty of playground space and wouldn’t have to do much to provide the physical activity kids need to be healthy. I truly hope someone takes this seriously at some point,” says Cambridge’s Pam Cash.

One interesting factoid: This disparity is particularly noticeable for kids ages 6-12, where sports participation in homes earning $100,000 or more increased 6 percent from 2023 to 2024 — but actually declined 2 percent for the wealthiest youth ages 13-17.

Why? Too much pressure, maybe. Instead of choosing one sport, some kids are loading up on two or three. Or else they’re specializing in one sport so narrowly, competing on so many teams with so many conflicting schedules, that they’re run ragged before they’re old enough to drive to a 9 p.m. practice themselves.

“These kids are often being fed sports with a fire hose,” said Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program executive director. “There is lots of pressure on them to play one sport year-round, traveling all over the place. Some are burning out or are just too injured to continue playing.”

Their parents are burned out, too, and this is true even for activities that kids enjoy. Westwood‘s Patrick French found time to weigh in on the extracurricular conundrum mid-afternoon, while driving his son to an a cappella lesson. Both he and his wife have full-time jobs with on-site components; she serves on their town’s school committee, and he performs in community plays. Their teens participate in soccer (school and club), theater, and voice. Occasionally, the couple finds time to watch a TV show; they’re midway through four different series and will finish one, hopefully “The Wire,” when they find time.

I ask French how we got here. I tell him that I remember my own childhood — when the highlight of my week was riding a pink Huffy to New London Style Pizza with my best friend, Vicky, and when extracurricular activities were held right after school, at the school. Seems quaint now.

“We’re often signing our kids up for all these structured activities in the hopes that, by doing all these things, they’re going to continue to really develop as human beings,” he says. “I think it’s probably peer pressure. If you’re not participating in as many things, then maybe, in some ways, you’re worried about your kid being left out.”

FOMO is real. Parents who weighed in for this piece underscored that the meteoric rise of club sports — with weekends-long travel tournaments in towns you’ve never heard of, often populated by college recruiters — are a presumed necessity for kids who long to compete at a higher level. Which, fine: But for every budding Jayson Tatum, there are thousands of anonymous athletes riding the bench and devouring 12 straight nights of Chipotle while their parents do off-camera Zoom calls from a hot spot in the parking lot.

Then there’s the mental load: the logistics, the carpool strategizing, the remembering which bag goes with whose cleats and which car goes to which field. New research from the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne, published in the Journal of Marriage & Family, reminds us that mothers overwhelmingly carry this mental load.

The study found that American moms take on seven in 10 of all household mental load tasks, ranging from planning meals and arranging activities to managing household finances. This comes as no surprise to any mother who has six different league-scheduling apps on her phone, a carpool text thread with 12 unknown numbers, and a rickety foldable chair with a cup holder rattling in her trunk, ready for action.

Emily Sheff, an assistant professor of nursing at Rivier University, has a PhD in burnout among nursing faculty. Expertise aside, the Bedford, N.H., mom is a work in progress as she navigates extracurriculars for her teenagers; in fact, she transitioned to a work-from-home teaching position to keep up with their schedules.

To maintain some shred of balance, Sheff wakes up at 5:10 a.m. for a morning boot camp to meet friends.

“That’s where we stress about our days ahead. I need to have fellow moms and friends in the trenches with me, and it helps to debrief and de-stress,” she says.

Meanwhile, pulling her kids from activities — even inconveniently timed ones — doesn’t feel like an option, either. Success favors the flexible.

“Then they miss out on an opportunity, which leads into the tryouts in two months, and that means they don’t make the team,” she says. “What I’ve been doing for the past 17 years is just taking on the burden, and then once every six to eight months, I have a huge cry session. I break, and then I pick up the pieces, and I start all over.”

Once a month, she joins friends for margarita lunches to vent about the inequity of it all, even though she has a helpful partner who pitches in. The household systems are so entrenched that it doesn’t much matter.

“My husband always says: ‘What can I do? How can I help? Let me know what to do.’ But again, it goes back to the mental load: If I have to know what to do in my head and then communicate to you what to do and then check after it’s done, that doesn’t even help,” she says.

Hingham’s Cam Smith, who has a fairly autonomous work schedule — and three kids in a total of 20 activities, many of which meet multiple times per week — sees the double-standard firsthand. Although he‘s the point person for most activities, many messages are still reflexively channeled to his wife, whose job is less flexible.

“I do think there’s a deeply unfair mental load which still gets put on mothers every time in this. The sports tend to be a little better, but all these activities take [my wife’s] contact info because they just assume she needs to be the primary contact. Our daughters have been competing in Irish step dance for more than six years, and we have tried numerous times to get their Irish dance school to add my contact to all their correspondence. They just don’t do it,” he says.

Brookline’s Julie Starr, a single mom who works full time as a nutritionist, relies on carpools and ride-sharing for her high-school athlete, who runs track and plays soccer. She outsources where she can because she has to: At a certain level, deprioritizing practices or games just isn’t an option.

Her work vacations don’t match up with her daughter’s vacations, but sports schedules don’t match working realities, either. So she improvises.

“If you go on vacation, you’re not going to play. During her school vacation, practices are during the day, so she takes an Uber sometimes,” Starr says. “The vacation weeks are horrible.”

Sometimes Starr takes client calls from the parking lots of games; other times, she skips games entirely (and hopes other parents let themselves off the hook, too). But she insists on serving a nutritious dinner no matter what — “we’re humans, not raccoons,” she says — but that requires conscientious meal prep on Sundays: sweet potatoes, pre-chopped salads, and roast chicken play starring roles. Even when she’s not working, she’s working.

Starr has advice for parents just now wading into the madness, wondering if their kids are benefiting from this whirlwind.

“Notice: ‘Are they happy? Do they really enjoy doing this?’ And don’t get too crazy before they’re in seventh grade, especially with the club and the travel teams — and find somebody to carpool with,” Starr says.

Needn’t be a friend, just a sentient being with access to a driver’s license.

Another key tip: Keep perspective.

“Having so many sports all at once is too much on their bodies as well. It’s about keeping in mind that, when they’re 25 years old, the bulk majority of these kids aren’t going to be professional sports players,” says Lakeville’s Krista Allan, a single mom who was widowed several years ago.

Time is precious. And so, when deciding how to occupy her kids, she thinks: “This is really about learning teamwork, learning how to take guidance from other people, and thinking through the real purpose of sports and activities for kids. I think it’s important to level-set.”

Wise words, but hard to remember when you’re driving from Raynham to Rowley in the hopes of seeing your child compete for 10 seconds in the high-visibility lacrosse tournament while eating a Chipotle burrito with your one free hand.

“I personally always feel like I’m running from one thing to the next and hardly ever taking time to just stop and — I don’t know — look at a flower blooming for a second,” says French, the Westwood dad.

That is, unless he‘s stopped in traffic on the way to a game at rush hour.

Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her @kcbaskin.