So much is going on in Manhattan that it is difficult to fit everything in. New Yorkers are compulsively sociable, working hard and playing harder. Another five hours a day would be useful, if only to get some sleep. But life in the suburbs is just as hectic, apparently. Ordinary family life is being squeezed out because parents and children have such full schedules.
After the first few years of bringing up children, when it sometimes seems it would be easier to employ an industrial cleaner than a nanny, parents soon discover that their daily duties amount to little more than being an on-call chauffeur, ferrying the little darlings from ice-skating at dawn, to school and on to Cub Scouts, swimming, music lessons and sports. Then there are the carefully choreographed encounters between boys and girls from different families that go by the sinister term “play dates”. The American term “soccer mum” is an inadequate misnomer; “limo mum” would be more accurate.
Now, across the Hudson River, parents have tried to claw back what is irritatingly called “quality time”. In the small, affluent community of Ridgewood, New Jersey, they celebrated their first Family Night last Tuesday. A parents’ committee persuaded the local schools and sports bodies to hold off on homework and extracurricular activities for a day so that families could spend an evening with each other.
Families all over the town then ate supper around the same table at the same time for the first time in years, played board games, cooked, prepared for Easter and generally hung out together like families used to in the Fifties. It was, of course, a desperate measure and one that stems from the compulsion nowadays to organise the lives of children in preparation for the competitive world where those who have bunked off school or watched too many episodes of Friends instead of doing their homework, or cannot boast at their university interview that they can play five musical instruments, find themselves at a severe disadvantage in the jobs market.
The inspiration for this movement to ease off on the pressure on children comes from two books, The Over-Scheduled Child by Dr Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, and Take Back Your Kids by Dr William J. Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota.
Dr Doherty says that many middle-class parents are so busy arranging their children’s lives that they have become little more than entertainment directors on a cruise ship.
He believes that in the past 20 years parents have been goaded by peer pressure to provide their children with all the opportunities they never had, in case the children in other rival families inch ahead of theirs in the race of life. “We are pushing competition lower and lower into childhood,” he says. “Pretty soon we’ll be seeing neonatal sports.” Research backs him up. American children now have 20 per cent less free time than 20 years ago.
The families at Ridgewood were not the first to declare a truce between competing parents. Two years ago in Wayzata, Minneapolis, inspired by Dr Doherty, who lives near by, parents joined together to wrest back some time for family life and set aside a day to try to instil some old-fashioned togetherness in their crowded lives. Other communities heard of the experiment and, according to Dr Doherty, followed suit.
It is a sad reflection on the life of excess that Americans enjoy, a lifestyle that the British covet and emulate without much discretion.
Certainly, the lives of my own children growing up in North London were little different from those of the busy children of New Jersey.
Society now seems to be divided between those who have far too much and those who don’t have nearly enough. A visit to a family in the deprived South Bronx would reveal children whose parents are so busy indulging their drug habit that they have little time or inclination to make sure their children are doing their homework.
Near Ridgewood is Bergenfield, a community that appears to take things to extremes, even when trying to get back to the simple life. Not to be outdone by Ridgewood, Bergenfield set aside the whole of this week for parents to abandon their usual hyperactive schedule. Suddenly faced with so much quality time, they didn’t know what to do with it. Before long the parents were up to their old tricks, over-organising themselves and their children.
Soon the week began filling up again, with a roller-skating party, mass outings to the cinema, which offered discounts for family parties, and even a basketball game on the empty playing fields of Bergenfield High School between teachers and the local police. What chance do the children have when their parents are so terribly confused?
War hero George W. rates low
I was all set to report on the Oscars from Los Angeles last weekend but was sent to Washington DC instead. The capital is leafy and full of birds, of which you don’t see many in New York outside Central Park. And the air quality is far better than in Lower Manhattan, which still suffers from the dust billowing from the clean-up at Ground Zero.
At Washington’s Museum of American History there is a new exhibition devoted to the Presidency, which includes a poll on who visitors think has been the most effective President. The results are surprising.
Of nearly 250,000 votes cast so far, George Washington is leading with 20 per cent. Then comes Abraham Lincoln with 16, followed by Bill Clinton with 14, just ahead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with 13. Ronald Reagan comes fifth with 6 per cent and in sixth place is George Bush with a mere 5 per cent. Thomas Jefferson is seventh with 4.
Even assuming that there may have been some confusion between the two George Bushes, that is a miserable score for the current President in time of war. Of course, the exercise is flawed and unscientific, but what could explain such a low score for George W., whom even his opponents credit with having risen to the occasion since September 11? Museum-goers may not be natural Republicans, but they are ordinary Americans from all over the country.
And what explains their lingering regard for Clinton, whose personal disgrace surely overshadowed his achievements?
Hypocrisy gets in your eyes
One of those miserable child custody cases which only America seems to throw up is dominating the restaurants of New York, where smokers, if they are lucky, are banished to the bar for a quick puff. David DeMatteo is disputing the visiting rights of his teenage son Nicholas demanded by his former wife Johnita.
Her smoking habit caused a great deal of friction when the family was intact and Nicholas, who is 13 and lives with his father, wrote to the judge saying he didn’t enjoy going to see his mother much because her home stank of tobacco smoke.
The judge has astounded everyone by telling Johnitta that if she ever wants to see her son again she must quit smoking altogether. She is appalled and claims that the judge’s ruling is out of line because it interferes with her basic human right to light up whenever she wants to. Libertarians and smokers have lined up against the health lobby and the politically correct.
Meanwhile, no judge has yet had the nerve to demand that obese mothers and fathers cut out their overeating and stop over-feeding their wretched offspring junk food, although that is just as dangerous to health as passive smoking. A recent report revealed that a fifth of American 20-year-old women have enlarged hearts and will die young as a result of hauling around their enormous bodies. Gross fatness and endless eating is an issue which still remains off limits here, where it would be more acceptable to call someone a Jew or a nigger than to say they were hugely fat.
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