Joseph Mahoney, a developmental psychologist at Yale, doesn’t walk around with images of frantic moms or stressed-out kids in his head. He doesn’t have children. He doesn’t see patients. But he has, for some time now, seen books like psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld’s “The Over-Scheduled Child,” getting a whole lot of attention. He has listened while experts like Madeline Levine (“The Price of Privilege”) and Edward Hallowell (“CrazyBusy”) get a whole lot of airtime to discuss the idea that too many activities, too much stress, too much frenetic busyness is driving today’s kids a little bit nuts.
This has bothered him.
Now, with coauthors Angel L. Harris and Jacquelynne S. Eccles, he has published a study in the current issue of Social Policy Report, which concludes, after much crunching of numbers and manipulation of variables, that “the overscheduling hypothesis” is false.
This bothers me.
Mahoney has long been an advocate for after-school programs. He has fought to keep the Bush administration from cutting funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the public after-school enrichment programs created in the waning Clinton years. He says he fears for the future of public enrichment programming if lawmakers become convinced that kids are already over-busy. “In this particular climate, if the message is, we have enough and kids are doing too much, policymakers essentially can decide that this is not important,” he said to me, when I called him to test the hypothesis that we were living on different planets.
For some, Mahoney’s contention that most kids these dayys aren’t particularly overscheduled and don’t seem to suffer any ill effects if they are has been music to sore ears. For parents who fear they’re ‘overscheduling’ their children, a new study carries a soothing message,” cooed Newsweek, in a story headlined “A new study shows that ‘overscheduling’ is a myth.”
The Boston Globe chimed in with this headline: “The more activities the better.”
That was all a big misunderstanding, Mahoney told me. “This is not meant to suggest that kids involved in these activities should be pushed to do more,” he said. “This is not to argue that family time isn’t important, that downtime isn’t important.”
And so, I pressed on, eager for clarification: Should parents who pack their kids into the car at 7 p.m. for ice hockey, piano and occupational therapy strapping their littlest one in with the remains of her dinner and hoping the middle one won’t get carsick doing homework – let themselves off the hook if they sense that something is out of whack with their lives?
“That’s a family issue,” Mahoney said. “We don’t deny there are families with achievement pressures. The organized activities can’t be used as a scapegoat. To blame the activities is just wrong.”
Sounds a bit like a “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” form of reasoning.
Call me stubborn, but it’s murky to me how you can separate family behavior, attitudes, atmosphere, expectations and stress level aas Mom spends the best years of her life in rush-hour traffic, muttering “Take me out and shoot me” to anyone who will listen from such variables as hours spent in organized activities. It’s not clear to me that it’s accurate to compare the programs Mahoney has studied school-based and community-based programs like the Boy andd Girl Scouts, which tend to be low-key to the layers of music lesssons, sports teams and other activities that minivan moms add to their children’s lives.
It’s also hard for me to see how you can rule definitively on the stress level of kids if you don’t ask them about it. Mahoney’s study didn’t. Another study, conducted early this summer by KidsHealth.org, did, and found that 41 percent of children aged 9 to 13 said they felt stressed always or most of the time, with the kids doing the most activities reporting the greatest level of stress. And this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report saying that, for some “highly scheduled children,” the “hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression .”
Critics say that Mahoney’s study is riddled with problems, ranging from his use of secondary data to the fact that his conclusions fly in the face of real-life experience. Of course, kids who participate in activities are better off than kids who do nothing at all after school, as Mahoney found. But there is still a limit to how much activity children can handle. Kids with a lot of activities may, as Mahoney found, achieve high marks in school, eat dinner with their parents and avoid smoking cigarettes yett still feel way more stress than is good for them.
The subject of family life is as prone to turf battles as any other in the world of academia and the popular media. These days, everyone wants to get a piece of the action. But scientists and the journalists who covver them have considerable power, particularly in influencing parennt behavior.
Given all the evidence, pushing “more is better” is simply irresponsible.