April 12, 2003 Kids may get camp overload It hardly sounds like summer fun: a preschooler attends violin lessons, a six-year-old survives daily hockey drills, and a 10-year-old struggles through math camp. As the registration deadline for summer camp nears, experts are warning parents to resist summer camp overload -- the seasonal sign of the emerging phenomenon known as hyper-parenting. "All too often, we're manufacturing kids and we're over-stimulating them. We know what happens to computers when we overload them," child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Children by Trying Too Hard?, says in an interview. During the academic year, an over-scheduled kid can rush from an early morning swimming lesson to school to an early evening piano lesson to late night homework. In the summer, a kid can jump from one camp to another to develop everything from athleticism to their entrepreneurial skills. "It seems to be a pretty universal way for the middle class and the upper class to raise kids. We don't allow our children and adolescents to develop their own lives, to develop their creativity, to fill boredom and develop personal interests," says Rosenfeld, a former head of the child-psychiatry training program at Stanford University. He is now in private practice in Connecticut. Canadian families today are spending more than ever on summer camps. In the last decade, the annual expenditure has jumped from $271 to $458, far faster than the rate of inflation. The percentage of households that spend money on summer camp has also risen, from 5.9 per cent to 6.8 per cent. Meanwhile, in the United States, structured sports time has doubled in the last 20 years, while unstructured children's activities have declined by 50 per cent. Rosenfeld says over-scheduling is less a product of the increase in working mothers and more a sign of an obsession with success. Just ask Amy Levinson. The director of the Amati String Studio in Vancouver always encourages parents to enroll preschoolers in a general program to discover the adventures in music and instrument making. Still, the violin summer program for three-year-olds is "very popular," says Levinson. "Believe it or not, there is a market." The Swing Shots Children's Golf Centre in Calgary has also carved a niche with a summer camp for three-year-olds. The youngsters practice on a three-hole "toddler course" at the city's only golf course for kids. |
