ith the school year underway, Kim and Steve Hunt of Swampscott are lining up extra-curricular activities for their daughters. They have already made one important decision: Less is more. Emma, who is 5 and starting kindergarten, will take ballet because she tried it last year and has asked pleasepleaseplease to do it again. Anna, who is almost 4, wants to try it, too. Together, they'll take swimming for the first time.
Kim Hunt's conviction falters only when she gets into conversations with other mothers.
filenes_final_29
''They can't believe my girls are taking swimming for the first time, when their kids have been taking swim lessons since they were 2. They can't believe my girls are only taking ballet and not also kindermusic and gymnastics,'' she says. ''They look at me and say, `Really.'''
As if there's something wrong with her and her husband. As if they are failing their children.
Unfortunately, scenes like this are popping up around the country, prompting Harvard University psychologist Dan Kindlon to put a name to it, ''the deadly syndrome of drivenness,'' and to write a book, ''Too Much of a Good Thing, Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age'' (Hyperion).
''Parents have this mistaken thinking that they are giving a child an edge,'' he says. Research shows the opposite is true: When children start structured activities too young (and 2, 3, and 4 is too young), it can hurt development and lead to emotional and physical stress.
It's not that extra-curricular activities are bad. Under the right circumstances, they can be wonderful, providing balance to academic life; enabling children to move their bodies in new and different ways; offering opportunities for social
ization; and, perhaps most importantly, allowing children to pursue passions.
Keep this in mind, though, says developmental and clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley: ''It's only a passion when it is of their choosing.''
She tells of a 10-year-old whose parents perceived their son as a quitter because he wouldn't stick with any extra-curricular activity. But he could play for hours in his room with his action figures, sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, and write detailed stories about them.
'' That's passion,'' she says.
Children need to be children. They need down time to be in control of what they do, without adult input or direction. When they don't have enough of that, family therapist William J. Doherty of the University of Minnesota worries.
''I'm hearing from pediatricians about kids with deep bags under their eyes and stress-related health problems,'' he says. ''I'm hearing from colleges about high-achievers who arrive so burnt out, they crash.'' His recommendation for elementary-age children is two hours of down time a day; Ehrensaft recommends at least 40 minutes. They both have written books on the subject, Doherty, ''Take Back Your Kids'' (Sorin Books), and Ehrensaft, ''Spoiling Childhood, How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Children Too Much - But Not What They Need'' (Guilford).
For years, Tufts University child developmentalist David Elkind's formula for extra-curricular activities was to start a child at about age 7 with three activities: something social (scouting or a church group); something creative (an instrument or art); something physical (a sport or dance). The idea was to tweak different areas of development. (Children younger than 7 don't need structured programs of any kind, he says, as long as they are in a good early-childhood program.)
Today, however, he's not so comfortable recommending three. ''If the 10-year-old who plays soccer isn't just on one team, but on two or three, where's the down time?'' he asks.
Overdoing it often backfires, says Manhattan psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld. He tells of two girls who started gymnastics together at age 2, were working with a coach five times a week at 8, and won the regional championships at 9. That same year, they both wanted to take a month off to be in a church play. The break from gymnastics was such a relief, they never went back.
That's likely because when children are plunged into activities at 2, or 3, or 4, they aren't doing the choosing (following in a sibling's footsteps is more likely mimicry). Even when a 6-year-old says he wants to take piano, what he wants is to play the way his teenage babysitter can; he doesn't have the cognitive ability to understand that takes years, or what it means to practice every day, even if that's what he agrees to do.
When children are in activities they don't like or in too many, it translates to pressure that builds to resentment. ''They feel as if they are not the authors of their own lives,'' says Rosenfeld. Unfortunately, the resentment typically culminates in the middle-school years - ''Dad, I'm done with tennis'' - just as a child is coming into his own. Indeed, Kindlon says, only mildly tongue-in-check, ''If you really want your kid to love something, don't let them do it until a few years after they have asked for it.''
Part of the problem, of course, is that parents feel pressured by requirements for college. Doherty urges parents not to even think about that until high school because of the potential for backfiring. Rosenfeld offers an example of a 14-year-old who decided to volunteer to teach art to deaf children because her aunt told her it would look good for college. As time passed, she became depressed.
''At [a new] level of cognition,'' he says, ''she could see it for what it was: using people.''
Unfortunately, some children feel pressure at even younger ages. A 9-year-old might think, for instance, ''I'm not good enough the way I am, otherwise I wouldn't need all of these lessons/enrichments,'' says Rosenfeld. He is co-author of another recently published book on the subject, ''The Over-Scheduled Child'' (St. Martin's).
Perhaps the most troubling twist from too much too soon comes from Elkind, whose book ''The Hurried Child'' (Addison Wesley), just released in its third edition, first brought this issue to public attention in 1988.
''Young children believe adults are all-knowing and all wise,'' he says. ''If we tell them they should learn something, and they don't, it doesn't occur to them that they are being asked to do something beyond their ability.'' Their conclusion: ''`I must be dumb. There must be something wrong with me.'''
In sports, he says, children who start at a young age can learn wrong habits because of the way the body is configured. As the body changes, they have to unlearn those habits. Their conclusion: ''I'm not good at this,'' or , ''I hate it.''
At least one community is addressing these issues head-on. Parents in Wayzata, Minn., an upper-middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, realized not only that they were accepting without questioning the number of activities in their childrens' lives, but also they were accepting as inevitable the way the activities eroded family life. They formed Family Life 1st.
Through community discussions, they asked coaches and instructors to cut back on practices, rehearsals, and meetings; to not penalize children who miss a practice for a family event; and to not expect family vacations to be sacrificed for team practices. They award a Seal of Approval to participating instructors.
Community conversations also empowered parents to go with their instinct. ''This was the kind of thing we whispered about but no one had the nerve to confront,'' says Jane Guffy, a mother of five and a Family Life 1st founder. ''Now we're all much more intentional about our choices.''
She says Family Life 1st is working because parents are realizing exactly what Kim and Steve Hunt of Swampscott know intuitively: Just because an activity is available, doesn't mean your child has to do it.
Contact Barbara F. Meltz at meltz@globe.com.
