Monday, July 26, 2004 Amid rush to achieve, encourage kids to be kids Somewhere on the road to today's go-go lives, children missed the exit called down-time, say parenting experts. "Kids ought to be allowed to be bored sometimes. To create something new all their own," says Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, child and adult psychologist and author of "The Over-Scheduled Child." (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95). Rosenfeld says children are so deeply involved in extracurricular and academic activities, things have gotten out of hand. "We all want to be good parents, but now a lot more is expected of you," he says. To be considered a good parent today, he says, society expects Mom and Dad to provide nearly unlimited amounts of enrichment. In observing the problem, Dr. William Doherty, director of the marriage and therapy program at the University of Minnesota, calls parenting among today's middle class "a competitive sport, with the trophies going to the busiest." It wasn't always this way. In his book "Putting Family First: Successful Strategies for Reclaiming Family Life in a Hurry-Up World" (Owl Books, $14), Doherty cites a University of Michigan study that found children have lost 12 hours per week of free time since the late 1970s. There's been a 25 percent drop in playing and a 50 percent drop in unstructured outdoor activities. "Kids used to have a world of their own," Rosenfeld says. "Most of the time they were free to invent their own world. They learned to make things happen. Make up a game. What does that mean if they don't do these things anymore?" No time to giggle at a "Scooby Doo" movie, read a book (that doesn't involve an impending report), ride bikes with friends or in many cases, even sleep enough. School-age children, according to studies by the National Sleep Foundation, are not getting enough shut-eye. The NSF reports children up to age 10 get 9 1/2 hours of sleep, although they need 10 to 11 hours a night. High school students, in some cases, get as few as six hours a night but require between 8 1/2 and 9 1/2 hours. Like most parents, Collette and David Sangston are on this merry-go-round, trying to give their kids advantages in life. The Phoenix couple help their three children juggle honors classes at school along with an assortment of time-consuming activities. Collette says they cope by setting priorities for children Keith, 14, Shana, 12, and Ryan, 11. "The first thing I've ever told them was, 'If your schoolwork ever starts failing or if you're giving me grief around the house, the first thing to go is your sport.'" Keith, a high school freshman this year, will be taking a math class that gives him dual credit for high school and college. He has played club team soccer for six years and recently took up tae kwon do. He's also a part-time soccer referee for younger players' games. Sixth-grader Ryan also plays club soccer. For a while he had the busiest schedule of the three because he also competed in gymnastics. Recently, he replaced the gymnastics with tae kwon do, "because soccer and gymnastics started colliding," he says. He also plays clarinet in school band. Seventh-grader Shana is a level 9 competitive gymnast. That means 21 hours a week at the gym. This school year she's adding flute and band to her schedule. "It can be a lot sometimes," Collette Sangston says, "but I see how much they're getting out of it." None of the Sangston kids seem to regret their busy schedules. When Keith's friends talk about an event he couldn't make, "sometimes I'm bummed that I missed it, and then they come to school talking about how much fun it was. But I went to sports to have a different kind of fun with another group of people." His father says without all the structured activities, the family would probably go camping together more often. "That's one thing we trade off," he says. In his practice, when Doherty encounters these issues affecting families and their ability to maintain quality time with each other, he counsels them to "take a sabbatical for a semester or summer from all optional outside activities," to rest and recoup. He advocates parents should begin by asking themselves hard questions about schedules, and stop regarding frenetic lives as normal and inevitable -- even if their kids, who have known no other way, won't. |
