The Montreal Gazette
February 19, 2005

Caution: Children at work: 'Hyper-parenting' is the catchphrase used to describe how we raise our kids. Is it all about success, or stress?

by Irwin Block

While their friends might be glued to a TV screen or playing video games, Alec and Ian Chung are hard at work at Junior Kumon.

The private learning centre in Town of Mount Royal offers math and reading programs for pre-school and kindergarten students, and Alec, 4, and Ian, 5, are eager to start.

"What would you like to do today?" asks instructor Julienne Tseng.

"I'm first," Alec bursts out as he begins to place numbered disks on a numbered checkerboard.

It's 3:30 p.m. and dozens of parents are waiting as their children follow Kumon programs.

The popular centre, which includes programs for older children and even young adults, is an example of the deep thirst among some middle-class parents to get extracurricular education for their kids - even before they have a curriculum to follow.

It is this quest for success, the drive by parents to give their children a competitive advantage, that has fuelled the so-called hyper-parenting or over-scheduling trend of the past 20 years. In some cases it can be a lifestyle issue, with both parents busy with careers, the decline of after-school programs in music and sports, or the fear of leaving young children unsupervised.

Parenting by micromanaging every minute of children's lives might still be a dominant trend but there are many parents and educators who say it's not necessarily the way to go - that children learn a lot when they play in an unstructured environment.

Andrea Schilling, Alec and Ian's mother, agrees, but says the stimulation Junior Kumon offers "is just a little extra head start."

Alec attends preschool and Ian goes to kindergarten in French, she explains. In addition to their once-a-week math session, their reading course at Junior Kumon offers exposure to English they are not getting.

The boys also attend swimming classes once a week and skiing lessons for 10 weeks in the winter, which Schilling says, is a long way from hyper-parenting.

"If I have to make an error in my parenting style, I would rather that it be on the side of doing too much than doing too little."

Her children's schedule is nothing like some of the extremes Montreal psychologist Abe Worenklein has encountered in his private practice.

A girl in Grade 4 at a demanding private school complained bitterly a few years back that her parents had scheduled her every day of the week, and weekends, for martial arts, basketball, swimming, Kumon, and jazz ballet. She also had to visit family every weekend and study a European language.

"This girl begged me to speak to the parents. The school gave her a load of homework and she had no time to unwind and just be with her friends. She was stressed out and didn't feel like she was part of the group."

Worenklein, who also teaches at Dawson College, says that with both parents working, it is tempting to schedule children in many after-school activities. He advises moderation.

"Professionals are seeing more and more kids that are stressed out, from early elementary school up, because tremendous expectations are made on them. People are sometimes cheating kids out of their childhood and I think that is a huge mistake."

There has been an explosion of such activities since the early 1980s. At the same time, books and magazines began catering to the hyper-parent in all of us. By the mid-1980s, Kindergarten Is Too Late! (1971) by Japanese author Masaru Ibuka, the founder of Sony, had become an international best-seller. Today, Kelly Wilton, publisher of Montreal Families, puts out a biannual guide listing over 200 activities for children, from yoga and martial arts to acting and cooking.

The preschooling movement developed in the United States in the 1960s as Head Start - a program for disadvantaged kids to help level the playing field at school, notes McGill University professor Jeffrey Derevensky of the School of Applied Child Psychology.

"The middle-class parents said this is a great idea and developed paid preschools."

Families, especially those where both parents are working, continue to push for "earlier and faster," and he sees few signs of a backlash against hyper-parenting, at least in Montreal.

"There is this idea that we cannot allow our kids to fall behind, since all the others are doing it."

The good news, he adds, is that most children are resilient. His advice to parents? They should "relax a little bit."

Though she doesn't regret it now, relaxed parents are not what Sara, 19 - she asked that her full name not be published - had while in elementary and high school.

"From 6 until 10, I took piano, played basketball in an all-inclusive sports program at Wagar High.

"I hated the piano, but I loved the sports. I'd come home from school and instead of watching TV for four hours, I got to do fun sports, played on the Cote St. Luc baseball team and did gymnastics twice a week.

"If anything, it made me a well-rounded person."

In high school, she dropped piano because by that time, "I was old enough to say no."

iblock@thegazette.canwest.com

Next: slow parenting

Some parents and experts are rejecting the hyper-parenting model. Canadian writer and parent Carl Honore, who is based in London, England, is the author of In Praise of Slow (Vintage Canada, $22). The wake-up call for Honore came when he found himself speed-reading the Cat in the Hat to his son Benjamin so he could get back to work.

Honore advocates Slow Schooling and Slow Parenting - "getting away from that roadrunner approach where people are trying to get their kids to read by the age of 2.

I believe in allowing the child room to breathe."

Four years ago, authors Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise sounded the alarm in The Over Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap (Griffin, $19.95): "This life of pressure and perpetual motion - the very essence of hyper-parenting - is giving us a generation-wide headache. It makes us (parents) feel tired and inadequate because no matter how much we have already done we could always be doing more," they wrote. "Kids deserve to have fun, down time, and empty spaces in their lives."

Kumon phenom
The Town of Mount Royal

Kumon centre, part of an international network founded by a Japanese high-school teacher, is the main centre of its type targeting the Sesame Street set. In 1987, there was one centre in Montreal; today, there are 15 with a total of 2,300 students.

Kumon learning centres now have 40,595 students - the youngest is 2 years and 7 months old - enrolled in their programs in Canada. A total of 1,507 are 5 and under, says Sandy Franco-Indig, a Toronto-based spokesperson for Kumon.