Chicago Tribune | Overscheduled, overwhelmed

THE QUICK Q&A
Overscheduled, overwhelmed
A calendar that's too full can drain kids' energy

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Joanne Trestrail
Published September 2, 2001

Name: Alvin Rosenfeld

Background: In "The Over-Scheduled Child" (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95), child psychologist Alvin Rosenfeld and co-author Nicole Wise offer alternatives to "hyper-parenting," trying too hard to craft perfect childhoods for children and focusing too much on accomplishments. Rosenfeld formerly headed child-psychiatry training at Stanford University and currently is in private practice.

Q--What do you mean by "overscheduled"?

A--It varies from person to person. But any kid that's scheduled from early morning to late at night, with no down time during the week, no time to hang out with friends, is overscheduled. Kids today have very little time for a life of their own. And their lives are so programmed, if they don't have something to do, they feel bored.

Q--They experience the absence of flurry as boredom?

A--Several years ago our kids' school had a no-TV week. The first day they were bored, didn't know what to do. But it was remarkable by the second day, they were finding things to do in their rooms, creating, imagining, writing, making things with Legos and Barbies, all kinds of stuff. In the absence of distraction, they created a world of their own, which I think has enormous benefit for their future mental health and their potential as people.

Q--They learned to not rely on outsiders to entertain them?

A--For sure. Being on your own makes you the creator of your world, the author of your own script, rather than the recipient of something handed out by someone else. Overscheduled kids, many of them, by the time they're 12 or 14, don't know who they are. The ones who are winning, doing all the accomplishments, feel like frauds.

They say, "Nobody knows who I am, because I constantly have to be who they want me to be." And the kids who can't live up to the standards feel there's no place for them. They drop out, often have problems with drugs and alcohol.

The kids are there to produce accomplishments. They're loved not for who they are but for what they can produce.

Q--It reminds me of Garrison Keillor's line, "All the children are above average."

A--You're either gifted or learning-disabled. It's quite a world. What's remarkable, if you look at the people who actually do succeed in life, they're not the people necessarily who went to Harvard or Yale or had all these accomplishments. I've read that something like 87 percent of CEOs didn't go to elite colleges, especially in the high-tech sector.

Q--Is overscheduling a mass hysteria? No one wants to be the one whose kids aren't doing enough.

A--I'm not against activities. But what's happened is, you have to be in every activity, all the time. You have to be in soccer and take flute and take French lessons and go for remedial I-don't-know-what and it's endless. It has become the American way of raising children. If you say, "I don't think we're going to do soccer this year," you get looks from other parents. You're treated as some mild variant of a child abuser.

Saying no has come to take courage. Saying, "I find my kids are happier with an hour of Monopoly than with soccer, frankly, and we get along better. We're not fighting all the time." I'm sick of telling my son, "Come on, we've got to go to soccer practice, baseball practice come on!" When he obviously is lollygagging because he doesn't want to go. Why am I pushing him? Is it for me or for him?

Q--And so much car activity.

A--I think parenting is a higher calling than being a camp counselor or chauffeur.

Q--How did overscheduling get started?

A--A lot of people in their 40s and 50s today were raised with a form of benign neglect. Your parents knew your name, they knew if you got in trouble, but during the day you were gone--it was your time, your world. In the 1960s and '70s, with the more psychologically oriented and spiritually oriented movements of those times, people started taking emotional development more seriously. So it started with the best intentions. It started and continues with the real desire to do right by your kids, to give them emotional security.

Q--And to give them opportunities?

A--A lot of people are worried, now that they've made it into the middle class or upper middle class, that if they don't keep up, their kids aren't going to stay there. But an odd thing is that in many cases we're guaranteeing the exact opposite result, because a kid who's constantly overscheduled, instead of feeling enriched, feels defective: "If I was as good as my parents keep telling me I am, why do they have to keep enriching me?"

Also, inadvertently we're giving a very unappealing image of what being an adult is. You don't see adults being adults anymore. You used to be able to peek in on a dinner party and see adults talking politics or music. Now all adults talk about are their kids. Why be an adult?

Q--Why do kids have to be good at 10 different things? I'm happy to meet an adult who's good at even one thing, who's good at his job.

A--I love to scuba dive. I don't expect to ever be really, really good at it. I don't think everything has to be done at a high level of excellence. My children play musical instruments. I don't expect that they will become professional musicians, but I hope they'll continue to enjoy music. This focus on expertise eliminates pleasure. It's like a kind of Puritanism.

Q--It goes back to what you were saying about accomplishment.

A--Why can't you do something that you're lousy at, but enjoy? Does everything have to be productive, or competitive? I think it's really unattractive, especially in children. The good ones know we want accomplishments and they try to give them to us.

Q--What's the way out?

A--I think the way out is for parents to say, "What really matters to me?" What's happened is that, instead of making character and relationships central, we've made accomplishments and possessions central. If you don't give your kids a sense of what life means to you, I think you've robbed them.


September 2, 2001	63°