The kids should play more golf.

Three kids. The oldest, the middle, the little one. Anonymous. Always.

The best thing I know to do with them is take them golfing. Not to the range. To the course. Play the holes. Keep a score. Rake the bunker. Shake hands on the last green.

That is how the game gets handed down, and it is what we are trying to do at our house. BowTiedGolfer wrote how he learned to play golf, and he put it plainly: passing traditions and etiquette from one generation to the next, on the course, “is the lifeblood of our sport.”

That is the whole thing.

Every other sport they play has an expiration date. Hockey becomes a beer league at 30 or 40, if you are lucky. Football ends, and you do not really play it again. Golf does not end. You play it with them at eight. You are still playing it at eighty, and by then the person across from you is a grandchild.

It also teaches a few things the other sports do not have time for. Honesty, because you call the penalty on yourself. Patience, because the ball does not care how badly you want the shot. Humility, because the game gets to everybody.

The one I would underline is poise. A child who can shake a 60-year-old member’s hand on the first tee, and look him in the eye, is going to be all right. At school. In a room. Wherever they end up.

More children are out there than there were. The National Golf Foundation’s junior participation numbers say just under 4 million juniors played golf on a course in 2025, the most since 2004. Good. It should be more.

This next part has stayed with me.

Tim Urban, at Wait But Why, wrote The Tail End, the piece where he counts how many days you actually have left with your parents. He did the math on his own. For the first 18 years he saw them on most of his days. Then college. Then he moved. He got down to something like ten days a year. His conclusion was that by the time he graduated from high school, he had already used up 93 percent of his in-person time with them.

He wrote that from the child’s side. Read it from ours.

Our World in Data’s chart of who Americans spend time with, by age comes from a decade of American Time Use Survey numbers. As teenagers we are still with parents and siblings. Then, in their words, as we enter our 20s, time with friends, siblings, and parents starts to drop off quickly. The longer explanation is on their time-use page.

So the window is now. Not someday. Before long the oldest is driving himself to the course. Then he is not asking me to come.

I would rather spend that window on a golf course than anywhere else.

Think about the four hours. When else do you get that long with a child and nobody looking at a screen? Not dinner. Not the car, most days. Not the couch.

In a tournament the phone stays in the bag. It is you, them, a card, and a number.

I wrote a few weeks ago, in he sat in the cart and said he wasn’t losing, that scores do not matter at this age. Time with no phone does. I still believe it.

You see everything in four hours. The bad bounce. The double on the first hole. The walk to the next tee, where they decide the hole is not going to beat them. You do not get to watch a child handle a hard moment at school. On the course you are ten feet away, every hole.

And you learn to keep your mouth shut. Stay off the greens. Let them pick the club. When they are done having fun, you are done playing. Padraig Harrington said it cleanly. Dylan Dethier posted the line on X: “It’s the love that should be first.”

This past weekend the middle one had his best tournament round yet. He is five. He was paired with a few older kids who had played Worlds at Pinehurst.

The oldest wanted to go it alone and carry his own bag, so my wife sat back in the cart and watched him. They finished before us.

The middle one was dancing. Actually dancing. He hit a driver and ran to the ball. He was having the time of his life, and for a while he was bringing it home under par.

It went a little like this.

“What club I hitting?”

“Driver.”

“Okay. I’m gonna yank this thing. Gonna hit it so far.”

He waggles over the ball and does a routine he taught himself. He waits for the other kids to hit.

“Dad, can I go find my ball?”

He sprints down the fairway, finds it, and sits on the ground next to it.

“Dad, what club I hitting now?”

“I don’t know. Let’s figure it out. What do you think?”

“I’m thinking pitching wedge.”

“You sure?”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure. Gonna smoke this and hit it super high.”

I am laughing. The ball is on the green.

“What I’m hitting fo?”

“Birdie.”

He lips the birdie and taps in for par. All smiles, all day.

On the 8th I could see his older brother and his mom up ahead. I waved them off before he saw them, and told them to meet us on the last green.

Then he sank the last putt in front of the friends who had already finished.

He might not remember it. He is five. His mother will. His brother will. So will I.

And the day was his. The middle one spends years as the one who came along. The oldest gets the firsts. The youngest is our daughter, and she gets the rest of the attention. It is a hard spot. Not that day.

Then there is the travel. The car. The hotel. Gas station snacks. Dinner with the other families. The ride home, where they go back over every shot, including the ones you would both rather forget.

Nobody tells you the car is the good part. Nobody is going anywhere for three hours. They talk. You listen. Sometimes they fall asleep and you drive, and you think about how lucky the day was.

I cannot name all of it. A plane with my son for a T100. Some of the worst fast food there is. A gas station breakfast sandwich, because the only breakfast place does not open until 9, the tee time is 8:00, and I booked the Courtyard instead of a kitchen. A hotel room and bad television. Pickup football and basketball in the lot. Cannonballs at the pool. Letting them do almost anything they want for an afternoon.

That is what they care about. Not the card. The trip.

It goes faster than you think. I know people who already went through it. They would take one more weekend of wasting the money.

So why isn’t everybody doing this? I see men I know at the club every weekend. Their kids are the same age as mine. I hardly ever see the kids.

Cost is real. Golf is not cheap. Youth on Course, the $5 junior round program, has children playing for $5 or less at more than 2,300 courses. The muni still counts. You do not need a logo on the bag.

Time is real. Four hours is a lot. So play nine. Play six. Play three and get ice cream. Let the little one sit a few holes out. They always come back.

The course intimidates people. A lot of parents think it is a place you get corrected. Wrong rake, wrong line, wrong shirt. So they stay home, and the children never learn it. Start young and teach it while you walk. A child who is trying gets slack. A child who was never shown gets looks.

A bucket of balls is not golf. It is practice for golf. Children need holes, because that is where they learn to rake a bunker, fix a pitch mark, and figure out where to stand. BowTiedGolfer calls par-3 courses golf’s missing on-ramp. Nine short holes teach more than a hundred buckets.

The rules are the part that gets me. Clubs used to be for adults, and adults only. A lot of them have changed. Junior camps. Family golf. Good. BowTiedGolfer had the balance right in The Kids are Alright, on club etiquette for children: integrate the children if you can, and still enforce a standard. I agree. Tuck in the shirt. Rake the bunker. Do not lock the door.

Not every club got that far. Ours didn’t.

We belong to two. The one we are leaving was supposed to be the easier one. Lower end. Quiet. We thought it would be simple.

It wasn’t. New rules, or old rules suddenly enforced, and now we are out.

Children cannot play on weekends until 3:30. Or on holidays. My oldest is eight. He carries a 10.

To get around their own rule, they added another. Under 13, you need a 7.0 Index. He is a 10. He plays more golf than most of the people the rule is protecting.

Here is the part that is almost funny. An eight-year-old getting to a 7.0 is a hard number on purpose. The rules make 18 difficult, so he posts nines. The way GHIN treats a nine-hole score now, moving that index down is a grind.

I suppose I could post a few scores that did not happen. That would be the opposite of the tradition they say they are keeping.

The other club lets children play when the course is open.

So a dad who still competes, with children who play more golf than the other children at the club, is walking out. We will leave. We do not need the bill.

That is how a club loses a family, and the next group of members with it.

Take them to the course. Play more of it. Nine on a Tuesday if that is the day you have. Sign them up for the local and carry the bag. Keep them fed. Let them sit a hole out when they are finished. Teach them to rake the bunker and fix the mark, and to shake a hand like they mean it.

The window closes. Spend it out there.

It is the best game there is. Go play it with them.