Speaking with a neighbor the other day, I envied news of his beach home in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Until, that is, he confessed with a sigh, “Most summers we find it difficult to go.” The reason? His children’s ridiculously complicated schedules. Turns out his daughters, neither yet 10 years of age, were heavily booked in a myriad of activities no doubt aimed at their mental and physical development.
This lifestyle has become commonplace across the country as parents transfer their own manic, calendar-driven lifestyles to their children. Gone, it seems, are the days when kids whiled away their summers tramping through the woods and creeks, building forts, biking all over creation, and otherwise discovering the world around them. The lives of many of today’s children are as over-schedulded as that of their parents (often the two being intertwined).
To what end? For many parents, it’s to provide their children with that “competitive edge,” meaning to give them the best shot at landing the college placement of their (which is to say, their parents’) dreams. Music, athletics, academics, arts, and so much more are packed into the lives of children as a means of providing the building blocks to “well-rounded” adulthood. Which is interesting given how few of those well-intentioned parents are themselves well-rounded.
What those parents are really doing, according to more than a few studies, is creating hyperactive, exhausted, and ultimately depressed children from whom the very spirit of childhood is being drained.
By dint of its relatively short span of time on this earth, the brain of a child is far less conditioned than that of his or her parents. Which is why children forever delight us with their simple, often-times poignant, always humorous observations on things we adults otherwise take for granted.
“Teach, your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by”
What a shame, then, that so many of us seem hellbent on structuring all of the creative expression out of those same brains. And it’s also not terribly surprising that by their teens so many of those same children become angry and resentful of their parents/task masters.
The thinking seems to be that by scheduling a child for piano, karate, soccer, Russian, advanced studies, and year-long athletics, the parent is in some way empowering that child to choose from a laundry list of capabilities later in life. Yet the rigidity of practice – especially today’s specialized practices – deadens the creative impulses and freelance interpretation native to a child’s brain.
Indeed, if you look across the span of history virtually all of the great artists, writers, musicians, etc., experienced anything but a structured childhood. Today’s “yuppy parent” would suffer heart failure if his or her child experienced the vagabond childhood of a Jack London, for example, he of steam tramping and oyster pirating and dropping out of school by the eighth grade.
One does not have to search far to find the listless or even deadened eyes of children over-scheduled by their parents. Recent studies confirm that such children are actually at risk of depression or worse.
Ironically, most adults consistently complain that their principal desire in life is to “have more time.” We are a taxed and exhausted bunch, racing from this event to that, almost mechanically accepting each new commitment. We are akin to high schoolers forever hoping that that next event, that next new venture, that next party will deliver the happiness we are forever seeking. We wax philosophic about the passing of the years and forward to each other saccharin email lists that counsel us to smell the flowers, always stop to smell the flowers.
The price tags on our homes and cars and colleges and kids and retirement keep going up and up and up, forcing us to work harder and earn more and pack more into a finite calendar. It never occurs to us that as everyone plays the game the price tag keeps increasing and taking a larger toll.
And so it is only logical that we suck our children into the same desperately competitive game. It is not enough to play soccer or lacrosse. The child must attend summer camps to improve his or her skills and participate in year-round programs dedicated to creating the very best athletes. But what happens when tens of thousands of such children all attend those same camps and reach those heightened levels of athletic capability? What happens when an entire childhood is consumed by overzealous parents and all those imagined benefits never materialize?
I suppose the answer is, that child develops into a modern adult.
