Families are in overdrive, leaving a trail of exhausted kids with little time to enjoy the moment

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

By CECELIA GOODNOW
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Just when Mary Jo Bruckner thinks she's got the balancing act down -- shuttling her three active sons to piano, choir, Boy Scouts, religious education and multiple sports -- the structure of her life comes tumbling down.

"It's the extra baggage that throws you over the edge," said Bruckner, a part-time speech pathologist who also presides over the Mercer Island PTA Council. "It's the end-of-the-year parties, the awards ceremonies, or it's the uniform exchange," she lamented. "It's no longer just as simple as your child participating in the activity."

Although the Bruckners are still at the high end of busy, they've taken a few steps to reclaim their sanity amid a groundswell of concern over the frenzied pace and high stakes of kid life in America today.

They found a piano teacher who honored their request for no piano recitals or juried competitions. They chose a laid-back Scout troop that doesn't force kids onto the Eagle Scout track. In summer, Bruckner and her husband, Jim, who coaches baseball, limit their kids to "only" two hours a day of organized activities.

Wendy Wahman/P-I

"To me, that's where the balance is," Bruckner said.

Small steps, maybe, but ones that many parenting experts would applaud as an antidote to a trend that has only intensified since Tufts University's David Elkind issued a warning nearly 20 years ago about "The Hurried Child."

Their concern: Kids are being pushed, prodded and stretched in too many directions -- or, worse, pressured to specialize in a sport or talent at far too young an age. No longer allowed to be kids, they're increasingly pressured to excel in everything, prompting some observers to ask, Whose life is it, anyway?

"Overscheduling," experts stress, isn't a code word for day care. Rather, it's a push-push mindset that can consume any family with means -- working couples and stay-at-home parents alike.

Here, experts say, are the costs:

• No time for family connection.

• No chance for parents and kids to enjoy the present, because the gaze is focused on the distant goal.

• No chance for downtime, the primordial swamp that gives birth to creativity, originality and self-discovery -- the very qualities parents say they want for their children.

• In severe cases, a higher risk for anxiety, depression and drug abuse.

What's going on here?

"Parents see themselves as in the business of product development," said University of Minnesota family social-science professor William Doherty, who has kick-started a national movement to lower the pressure and reclaim family life. "Kids are seen as bundles of potential."

Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, former head of the child psychiatry training program at Stanford University, sympathizes with parents' desperate quest to give their children the best start in life but worries that kids are being seriously hurt by good intentions run amok.

At the outlandish extreme, he tells of a couple who paid their nanny $500 for each developmental milestone their toddler hit ahead of schedule. More mundanely, the trend shows up in Mozart for fetuses, or year-round elite sports, expensive SAT prep courses, or toddler gymnastics to "enhance" motor development. It's no one thing; it's everything.

"I think this overscheduling is a crucial issue. I think it's really harming kids," said Rosenfeld, now in private practice in New York and Connecticut. "What we're talking about here is a sense of balance, a sense of listening to your kids."

He and journalist Nicole Wise state their case in "The Over-Scheduled Child" (St. Martin's Griffin, 263 pages, $13.95), originally titled "Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?"

Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist at Harvard, wrote the foreword, adding weight to the issue.

Rosenfeld wishes parents would relax and enjoy their kids.

"Everybody is so nervous about getting it right, and they're trying too hard," he said. "Today we have all this information given to us in this anxious manner -- 'Research says ...' Of course, next week it's all wrong.

"What gets missed is that every kid I speak to wants one thing from his parents -- time to do nothing."

To Elizabeth Crary, parent educator at North Seattle Community College and co-founder of Parenting Press, it's a familiar story. She said she's heard more than one protest from a certain little girl who "looks like a lost waif" as she juggles seven or eight activities.

"What the child said," Crary said, "is she just wanted time to hang out with her mom. But the mother didn't hear it."

The rat race has gotten so bad that three top Harvard officials wrote a paper, published last December in The New York Times, urging kids to slow down, discover their true passions, resist the resume-padding game -- even put off college for a year to catch their breath.

They portrayed the academic pressure-cooker as just one aspect of society's frenzy for the brass ring, symbolized by young dot-com millionaires and the astronomical earnings of top athletes, entertainers and CEOs. Even play has become work.

"Sports, music, dance and other recreational activities used to provide a welcome break, a time to relax and unwind," wrote the Harvard officials. "No more. Training for college scholarships -- or professional contracts -- begins early, even in grammar school."

No one knows that better than the folks in the trenches.

"We see it on a daily basis," said Donna Eken, a longtime athletic director at the Mercer Island Boys and Girls Club, which recently decided to cut back on elite, high-performance teams. "There are some kids who are so mentally exhausted, they can't be around other kids. They break down and cry."

Often, she said, the fragility shows up in children at 12 or 13 whose parents pressured them to specialize in a sport at age 9 or 10 -- far too young, in Eken's view. The pressure on these elite athletes can be so intense that by the end of the day, the slightest mishap, from a bump on the basketball court to a hang-up in the Snapple machine, can push them over the edge.

"They're so emotionally tired, they just break down," Eken said. "It's sad, it's sad."

Although the Harvard paper has stirred a lot of discussion, some parents just don't get it, said co-author Marlyn McGrath Lewis, admissions director at Harvard College, the undergraduate program at Harvard University.

"People are looking for a new rule to follow," Lewis said in an interview. "It's hard to convince them to come up with their own rules. (The issue for students is) 'What do you love,' not what do you think other people want you to love?"

Meanwhile, the marathon continues -- at least in families with the bank accounts to support their high aspirations. Paradoxically, children in poverty are more likely to suffer from underscheduling, experts say, because they usually lack even basic resources such as quality child care.

Hyperparenting, often seen as a phenomenon of affluent whites, is more a function of values and income than ethnic background, some say.

"I see it as more a class thing than racial," said John Stokes, a black therapist in Chicago whose non-Medicaid clientele is about 40 percent white and 60 percent black. "Once they get to a certain income level, they're the same in this regard."

The challenge is to help overtaxed families connect the dots.

"The biggest complaint in families, without question, is not enough time," said Seattle psychologist Laura Kastner, a private practitioner who teaches at the University of Washington and has worked 22 years at the adolescent clinic at Children's Hospital.

But it's tough to persuade parents to drop something -- anything -- from their child's schedule because each activity is seen as valuable. They reply, "Yes, but, yes, but ..."

"People pay me for this and they still don't listen to me," said Kastner, who half-jokingly likens parental resistance to an alcoholic's denial. Plowing through their resistance, she gives it to them straight.

"You've just got to grieve the loss of soccer," Kastner tells them sternly.

Staying busy isn't always bad, she added. Some kids thrive on a full dance card, if it's their choice.

A bigger problem comes when parents derive too much personal satisfaction from their children's achievements. A prime example is high-powered parents who quit their career and turn their child into their "project."

"I would never say it's mostly mothers who work," Kastner said. "Never in a million years."

Rosenfeld, who has three children ages 8 to 14, concedes that parents have always basked in their kids' achievements. So what's new?

"Today," he said, "it's invaded every aspect of their lives. It's all on steroids. Now you have to be perfect in everything."

That's one of Mary Jo Bruckner's pet peeves. Her 14-year-old son, Joseph, quit piano because he just wanted to play for pleasure and couldn't find a teacher who would let him go at his own pace.

"Once you get to a certain age," Bruckner said, "the teachers want you performing at a certain level, and it's not OK that you're just 'good enough.' We don't allow kids just to be OK or to be average. (And) in sports teams, there's such a push to go beyond the rec level."

Rosenfeld said some experts suspect that one reason kids bury themselves in Nintendo and Game Boy is for self-directed solitude, free of parental micromanaging.

For severely overtaxed kids, the stakes can be high. In an article for pediatricians, he and Wise wrote:

"We suspect that this hyper-rearing way of life contributes to the increasing incidence of middle-class teenage depression, substance abuse and sexual acting-out."

Local therapists believe it.

Kastner said some teens come in because of seemingly unrelated issues such as eating disorders. But when she probes, she uncovers a wellspring of parental pressure that feeds into the problem.

Mary Kay Morgan, director of Mercer Island Youth and Family Services, said she sees clinical symptoms in a substantial number of hot-housed kids.

"We certainly see kids that have significant anxiety," Morgan said, "and I think one factor in that is a real experience of pressure to succeed. And (we see) kids who are depressed -- a sense of being overwhelmed."

Everyone has stories:

• Whidbey Island researcher Connie Dawson, who taught counselor education at Portland State University, knows career moms who dropped out to spend time with their kids, only to find that old managerial habits die hard. They became de facto recreation directors who spent their time organizing field trips.

  Elsewhere, she has heard of parents taking notes at their 4-year-olds' dance classes so the preschoolers could hone their skills at home.

• Jean Illsley Clarke of Minnesota, Dawson's research partner and co-author, recently got a phone call from a friend stumped by her 7-year-old daughter's emotional outburst in piano class. On the day in question, the child had gone straight from school to ballet class before proceeding to her piano lesson. By then it was 7 p.m. and she hadn't had dinner.

  "The teacher was cross with her and she burst into tears," Clarke said. "Is it any wonder?"

  Clarke said she has tried in vain to get her friend to ease off. "She's doing the very best for her children that she can," Clarke said. But "the pressure to have her kids do all these things is so great she can't hear me."

So what's driving this bullet train? The culprit fingered most often is anxiety. Anxiety to be a perfect parent. Consumerist anxiety fed by media images of the good life -- and by the basic competitiveness of society.

Social historian Stephanie Coontz, national co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and a professor at The Evergreen State College, blames the trend on society's attitude of "winner-take-all, dependence-be-damned."

"It's not just the problem of asking individual parents to back off of our kids," she said. "As a society, we have to rethink our social values."

That's exactly what's happening in the affluent suburb of Wayzata, Minn., home of a non-partisan, non-religious revolt called Family Life 1st.

The grass-roots campaign, sparked by Doherty and a Wayzata mother named Barbara Carlson, is based on a belief that family time should be a priority of the whole community.

That means persuading coaches not to bench kids for missing practice to attend a family celebration. It means getting flute teachers, catechism instructors and science-fair leaders to value, say, family dinners and to schedule accordingly. The group bestows seals of approval on activities that meet those ideals.

Communities in New Orleans, Omaha, Neb., and Eden Prairie, Minn., have talked of signing on to what Doherty hopes will be a national movement.

How will the stress-for-success trend play out?

Rosenfeld, among others, feels change in the air. "I hope families playing together, families enjoying time together, takes a more important role," he said.

Some predict a turnaround once the dialogue intensifies enough to create a tipping point in society.

"Where we are now," Doherty said, "is that the conversation is spreading far and wide."

With a chuckle, he added, "It's always everybody's favorite thing to worry about -- the decline and fall of civilization. I am confident that there's enough sanity in America that once we begin to name these problems, we'll begin to turn it around."

Getting back on track

How do you know if your child is overscheduled? Where do you draw the line? Experts say the goal is balance. Some kids are unmotivated or reclusive and need a little push to come out of their shell. Others are go-go by nature, and it's up to parents to decide whether they need to be reined in. "I think they should ask the kids what they want to do," says 10-year-old John Paul Bruckner. That's not a bad place to start.

Here are other suggestions:

• Ease into downtime slowly, like a couch potato starting an exercise program. Start with five minutes of "cloud-gazing" and build up. "The people I know who are very structured -- they'd go berserk if they tried to (immediately) have half an hour unstructured," says Seattle parent educator Elizabeth Crary.

• Mark a calendar with X's to block out sacrosanct family time, advises Seattle psychologist Laura Kastner. And overcome your own fear of an unplugged TV. "We have all this noise in our lives that protects us from the ambiguity of free-floating time."

• Teach life skills along with the finer things. "This kid may never have done laundry but plays Beethoven sonatas with ease," says researcher Jean Illsley Clarke. "But in life there is laundry."

• Use the summer slowdown as a chance to hang out and do nothing with your kids -- that's when meaningful conversations occur, says Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld. Keep expectations kid-size and, as Dr. Spock said, "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."

• Tune in to KING-TV/5 at 4 p.m. Aug. 2 as "Oprah" re-airs "What Kids Really Need," an episode devoted to Rosenfeld's message.

• Check out the Web site www.familylife1st.org for more strategies and tips.

• Also see: "The Over-Scheduled Child" by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise (St. Martin's Griffin, 263 pages, $13.95); "The Hurried Child," by David Elkind, newly revised (Perseus Books, 288 pages, $16), and "Take Back Your Kids" by William J. Doherty (Sorin Books, 158 pages, $12.95).

P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow can be reached at 206-448-8353 or ceceliagoodnow@seattlepi.com

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