N Fridays after school, when the Fitzer and Magruder children play soccer at North Main Rotary Park in Greenville, S.C., the usual rules of the game apply, but not the usual annoyances. Their parents decided to pass up the local Y.M.C.A. league, along with the rush-hour drives and the dinner delays it would entail, in favor of old-fashioned pickup games. The players mostly 4 to 7 years old meet half a block from their elementary school. There is no rush, no $50 fee and no pressure to join the game.
"Whoever shows up shows up," said Heather Magruder, who used to coach her 8-year-old son, Dylan, and 7-year-old daughter, Corey, in the Y league. "If somebody's mom calls them in to dinner, you just readjust the teams."
"We wanted our kids to have experiences closer to what we had," Ms. Magruder said. "You picked sides, put a goal down, and you played." Or you didn't. Today, however, "your kid has to know how to do everything by age 8," she said, adding, "It's more important for us to be a sane family and not just spend our time running from here to there."
A generation ago, the latchkey child was the most forlorn image in the parental universe. Now it is the overscheduled child, who, whether driven by parental ambition or the necessity for afternoon supervision, never stops moving. Jumping from Spanish to karate, tap dancing to tennis with hours of homework waiting at home the overscheduled child is as busy as a new law firm associate.
But many parents have begun resisting the push to avail their children of every planned activity that a retail society can offer. These dissenters say they prefer to give their children plenty of time just to be children, to spend less time in car pools and more in sandboxes and spontaneous dodge-ball games.
Many parents if not their children are simply ready to slow down. Nancy Eisen Fitzer, who helped organize the informal soccer league in Greenville that her son Isaac, 7, and daughter, Shona, 4, play in, said that she and her husband, Matthew Fitzer, wanted to "step off the high-pressure merry-go-round" of youth achievement.
"When I talk to some of these parents whose kids are going to swim practice eight times a week, and they say, `She loves it it's so much fun,' I wonder, How fun?" Ms. Fitzer said. "Some kids thrive on that kind of schedule, but my own child is very sensitive about not having down time."
In her community, Ms. Fitzer said, there is an expectation that children join organized sports at age 4.
"This starts so young," said Janet Chan, the editor in chief of Parenting magazine. "We're talking now about parents with babies who have them in tumble classes and swim classes."
Of course, pulling back is rarely as easy as it sounds. "How do you get a mother to say, `I don't feel like I'm a chauffeur' for a change?" said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist in Manhattan and an author of "The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap" (Griffin, 2001). "When you try to cut back, there are pressures from neighbors who say, `You're not taking Johnny to soccer?' and you feel somewhat insecure, as people tend to be, particularly about their parenting."
Such laments may be unfounded, according to one expert who has studied children's schedules. "I don't believe in the hurried child for a minute," said Sandra L. Hofferth, a professor of family studies at the University of Maryland who, with John F. Sandberg, conducted a study in 1997 on the ways children use their time.
Their report, published in 2001 in The Journal of Marriage and the Family, was based on interviews with 2,119 children age 3 through 12 nationwide and compared their answers with those from a nearly identical study in 1981. It showed that, although children averaged 1 hour 10 minutes more each week in 1997 than in 1981 on organized sports, 20 minutes more on studying, 2 hours 43 minutes more in day care and 2 hours more in school, they still had time to play for 12 hours and watch television for 13. "There is a lot of time that could be used for other things," Ms. Hofferth said.
