Who’s got time?
Child's Play x2 | May 22Baseball practice. Soccer Practice. Piano recital. Boy Scout meeting. Kaplan tutoring. School play. Dance class. Karate class. Oh, and maybe some homework. Dinner? Not enough time. Family time? What’s that?
Nowadays parents are apt to schedule everything under the sun for their kids. It’s done with the best intentions, of course. Sports teach teamwork, the arts teach abstract thinking, taikwondo teaches how to kick that bully’s ass. But with all the things we sign our kids up for, what are we teaching them when it comes to the value of family time?
Of course, we tell ourselves that this is really for the best. Nevermind the fact that Junior hates playing baseball and that little Sally cannot play chopsticks to save her life. It’s good for them. It builds character. And as we schedule our kids from 6:00 a.m. until bedtime (and for teens, bedtime is later now than it ever has been) we feel supported by the fact that this will all translate into a good pre-school/montessori school/prep-school/college. They’ll have the inside track towards the American Dream (which is apparently owning a very large house that you never spend time in).
Well, if you’re still with me (and some of you might not have had time to read this since basketball practice starts in 10 minutes) I have some good news. People are starting to fight back. The city of Poway, California, for example, is fighting back this very day. The City Leaders of Poway have called for a Family Focus Night tonight. They have asked schools, sports leagues, dance studios and the like, to not schedule anything between the hours of 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. This will be a chance for families to dine together and be together as one without rushing off to the next scheduled appointment.
Hallelujah! This is the four hour block the city of Poway has made. Let us rejoice and be glad. Of course, one wonders what they will actually talk about if they haven’t sat down in the same room in over a year. I imagine the conversation will revolve around how to schedule all the make-up practices/games/homework that will have to be addressed in the coming week.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take the kids to their pig latin sign language class. But what do you think? Are we over-scheduling our kids or are we preparing them for the “real” world where multi-tasking is the norm? Discuss.
Is there even time for kids to just Play anymore?
I let them learn all that stuff from TV ;)
One evening a year? That ain’t nothing! Just ask any Mormon what they’re doing on a Monday night and they’ll tell you it’s Family Night. Every single blessed Monday night of our lives for 4 agonizing hours. I can’t tell you how this ruined my teenage years. Until I realized that even if I could call my best friend on Monday night, she was going to be off bowling with her family anyway. Can you imagine how much damage we incurred by this excessive time with our parental units and siblings? At least most of my friends were equally damaged, lol…
I couldn’t agree more, even though we are a few years away from the scheduling thing. I also understand that there is a lot more homework now than when I was in school. My heart is really with school age kids these days. I was thinking about only one activity at a time for my daughter, so that she has time to just unwind and chill out, but I guess we’ll see how that one plays out.
We’re not there yet, but my own childhood was sometimes dominated by my brother’s baseball schedule, and my dad wasn’t at home in the evenings because he worked a swingshift. So that kind of precluded my sisters and me from doing anything else during the week that would have required getting driven somewhere.
When my kids are old enough, I do want to let them try different things, but I’d like them to take swimming lessons and learn some kind of instrument. But other than that, I think I’ll restrict them to one activity/sport at a time. This is still a ways off, so in the meantime, we’re just going to relax and spend time with them.
And with one person working overtime, another finally getting in to see the dentist since they (finally) don’t have to take the kids to soccer practice, teens that have no intention to spend a momment more than they have to in order to get money/car keys/whatever else, the plan will be called a “HUGE Sucess”, because one or two familes somewhere that they will actually interview will talk about “how they sat around the dinner table together for the first time in 187 years.”
It is a nice concept, but you can not MAKE people focus on Family. In the linked article, just look how “thrilled” her son appears to be by the idea in the photo.
I like and strive for family time for my family. But trying to tell other people how to live their lives is rarely a good idea.
There are also two sides to the “over-scheduled child,” and each needs to be viewed differently. The first is like in the example you give, the child that is over-scheduled by a parent trying to give the child an “edge.” To me these are parents that border on abuse because in many cases the child has no desire to do these things. In this case, parents who think this way will most likely not agree with the fact that their child is over-scheduled, because they are “doing what is best for their child to get ahead” and the “others” are just weak, and exactly the people that they want their child to be “better” than.
The second is the child that wants to experience and do everything. In this case, I really think things are much more simple. Give the child the opportunity to “start” to burn out with over activity, and then try to steer them towards commitment since you can not give “it all” to 5 different activities at one time, so try and get the child to understand that and allow THEM to make the choices.
In any case, knowledge is the best tool to improve the family. You can’t legislate the family dinner.
I don’t overschedule my children. Right now my son has Tae Kwon Do twice a week. That’s it. He also had Boy Scouts once a month, but that’s ended as school is almost over. He *likes* his downtime. A lot. My daughter, on the other hand, would be content to do every single activity we could cram into a week. She has Tae Kwon Do once per week, soccer practice/games once per week, and she just finished up with Daisy Scouts, which met twice a month. She’s begging me for gymnastics, equestrian, dance, and swim lessons. BEGGING.
The one thing that will always be a constant, though, is family dinner time. Even if we’re going to have to catch a quick dinner on the go, we sit down together to eat. Always.
You know what? When i was a kid, we didn’t have any homework until the 5th grade. I can remember that excitement when I got my first assignment, “I’ve got homework!” I exclaimed with glee.
Why do kindergarteners have homework now? Anyone know? Anyone ever fight this concept and win?
[…] We just get busier and busier all of the time, don’t we? If it isn’t driving our kids to one activity or the other, then we’re doing homework, washing uniforms, or on the internet. […]
Generally speaking, I don’t understand the desire to schedule children for every waking moment. My freinds often ask me why I don’t let my kids participate in every scheduled activity My response will always be, “family first”. My children have piano once per week and the teacher comes to my house, Girl Scouts once per month which focuses on serving the community, I know because I am the leader, and soccer once per week. Nothing will ever come before our family dinner. Ever. They will never look back and say, “Boy, we never spent any time together.” We do and love it. Plus, I often see over-scheduled pre-teens get tired of having to go to the next event and drop out–just when the need for supervised activities is most needed. Keep the focus on fun and the kids thrive.
Have you ever been to Poway? It freakin’ sucks. If I was a child growing up in in Poway, I would be really psyched if I had a soccer playing piano drama practice to go to, because otherwise I’d be investigating what all the fuss is about with inhaling aerosol fumes. But, yeah, overscheduling is bad. Family time good.
As parents, we want the best for our children and we try our darndest to offer them what we didn’t have when we were growing up. But at the same time, family life comes first for us!
I’m a SAHM, and my 5 y/o son is doing some activities so that he doesn’t ask “what’s next?” all the time. But the weekend is reserved for family stuff.
Obviously overscheduling hurts the kid if he’s stressed and would rather be at home, but…
I sort of grew up in the ballet studio, I was passionate about it and it’s the only thing I wanted. By the time I was a teenger, I spent at least an hour or two doing that per day in addition to any rehersals, etc. I’m grateful I got the chance to grow up that way. Still, I ended up being this hard-core goth chick, had major depression & got into all kinds dope & so forth later on, so why go by my example? Oh well, I cleaned up good & turned out OK after years of therapy (har har)
My 5-year-old son spent his weekend productively, occupied as the official tester of the sprinkler hoses, checking at regular, minute-to-minute intervals to make sure they were still sprinkling.
To me, that’s what summer is about. Yes, they’ll have swimming lessons, because that’s an essential skill. And our 5-year-old goes to Kung Fu with his daddy occasionally on Friday nights. During the school year, the kids have Youth Group on Wednesdays, but so far, that’s about it. He is learning guitar, but so are his daddy and I, so we’re all three doing it together.
We’ve begun asking our eldest about things he’d like to participate in, but we hope that even after his little sister is old enough to be in various activities that we’ll still have family time. I think it’s absolutely essential.
My brother and I weren’t in many activities until high school, and even then, we were in a lot of things together, and still had time together as a family, especially during the summer. To this day, our family can spend a week together and never run out of things to do, or talk about. We genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and have adjusted easily from a family dynamic where parents were the authority figures to where we can also be friends with them. This wasn’t the case in my husband’s family, where his parents were divorced, and he was so overscheduled, especially in high school, that he spent more time out of school for various events than in classes. Not only is his relationship with his folks far more strained than mine, but they’ve never adjusted to treating him like an adult, because they weren’t there while he was growing up.