DALLAS FAMILY Cover Story:   Published waaaaaay back in Oct 1999, but remains a favorite of Elaine’s because it’s such a timeless topic!  

 HARRIED KIDS, HURRIED HOUSEHOLDS

HARRIED HOUSEHOLDS … One of about 30 parenting features written for DFW regional magazines.

** We drive ourselves crazy driving our busy youngsters all over town – to soccer and dance and countless other opportunities for extra-curricular enrichment. But are we doing it for them — or for us?  And when do today’s kids-on-the-go get the chance to, well, just be kids?

By Elaine Rogers
                                                                   

Chances are, your refrigerator calendar is crammed with more graffiti than a downtown bridge, assaulting the senses with a jumble of jotted appointments & addendums regarding the time commitments of the minors residing in your household. There’s no room for error, flexibility or spontaneity here. And any glaring white square indicating a night free of anything but the basics of homework, dinner and bathtime is a rarity. Possibly an abnormality.

For many Dallas-area families, the only thing rarer than the parents “odd night out” is the kids’ “odd night in.” Can you imagine? A night with no soccer practices or karate lessons. No dance classes or enrichment programs. No carpooling or drive-through dinners. Just a quiet evening for the kids to romp in the backyard and revel in the simple joys of childhood. Hmmmm.

Now that may not seem any more connected to the reality of your life than June Cleaver’s hairdo, or better yet, her pristine little kitchen calendar which probably had a whole lot of white space barely punctuated by a few nifty notations about nothing in particular. But, maybe it ought to be. Maybe your busy youngsters could use a few more nights to just be kids instead of kids-on-the-go, and maybe you need more time to sit and enjoy them — preferably from somewhere other than the driver’s seat of your car.

“We’re on the road a lot,” says Mildred Ellis-Farmer, a self-employed consultant and mother of three in Grand Prairie. “It’s pretty much the story of my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do when the baby starts having scheduled activities. Go crazy I guess.”   While her three-year-old daughter is currently unscheduled, Ellis-Farmer has a nine-year-old daughter involved in dance, soccer and scouting and a five-year-old son who’s on a soccer team.

Although her daughter’s dance activity “was competitive” last year and involved extra rehearsals in addition to the weekly soccer practices and Saturday games, Ellis-Farmer says her family’s extracurricular routine is actually “very mild” compared to many of her peers’.

“On paper I’m overscheduled,” adds Michelle Barlen of Arlington, a self-described “carpool mom” of four boys aged 7 to 16, all of whom are actively involved in two sports per season. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem as bad as it looks.”

With multiple practices in addition to games, Barlen admits to a rather mind-boggling weekly itinerary, yet seems unfazed. “It’s all about practicalities. Some seasons, we’ll even choose our teams based on carpooling.”

She jokes that parents of teammates and other neighborhood kids will often say, “Oh, you’ve got to be on our team next season” and she never knows whether the invite stems from her sons’ athletic abilities or the potential for carpooling convenience. But it doesn’t really matter, she adds. “The great thing about sports is that they’re keeping them busy and they’re not unsupervised and getting into trouble.”

While many parents share Barlen’s favorable view of their extra-curricular involvements, experts warn that signs of an overly-busy schedule can take its toll on the family in both obvious and unexpected ways. Kids who get grumpy after soccer practice may not be a shock, for instance, but kids who start acting out at school may confound parents who see the specific behavior as the problem rather than a symptom of a overstressed child.

When kids are stressed, there’s a wide range of outward manifestations of their internal feelings,” says Celeste Johnson, Director of the Psychiatry Department at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. “Kids don’t think like adults — if they did, they might just tell their parents, ‘I’m acting this way because I’m tired and feel out-of-control of my life.’ Instead, when a kid is anxious and stressed, you see a whole pattern of symptoms that have to be deciphered.”

David Elkind, an author and child development professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts, warns that despite their best intentions, parents may expose their children to overwhelming pressures with their willingness to enroll kids in so many extra-curricular activities. As author of a 1981 bestseller, “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon” (Perseus Press, $14), Elkind revised the book in 1998 and says kids may develop certain negative behaviors and even physical symptoms as a result of overscheduling stress. Among them: illness & exhaustion (no real surprise here) as well as bullying and elevated cholesterol.

Interestingly enough, a 1998 University of Michigan study indicates a dramatic increase over the last 20 years in the amount of time children spend in organized activities. According to the report, children’s free time — the time left over after school or day care, eating, sleeping and other activities – has decreased from 40 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 1998. (Surveying 3,586 kids age 12 and under, the study determined that children had lost 30 minutes a day or nearly four hours a week in play time during that period.)

“I see kids with behaviors that may very well be related to being overscheduled and overwhelmed by it all, adds Dr. Milton Cardwell of the N. Texas Center for Learning and Behavior at Baylor Health Center at Irving/Coppell. “Sometimes they’re cranky or inattentive and sometimes they act out in certain ways.”

He explains: “Kids who aren’t getting enough rest will react against that, and they have a limited repertoire of behaviors they can use to signal stress or fatigue or feelings of being overwhelmed. … They might have temper tantrums or just engage in bullying behaviors because by belittling someone else, they may feel better about themselves and a little more in control for a short period of time. You never know how it will affect different individuals.”

“Bullying is endemic,” Elkind says in his book. “In all sorts of directions, we see signs of stress, of being too hurried.” Elkind further theorizes that today’s trend of overscheduling kids is a newer version of the ol’ ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ routine. “Status used to be the car you drove, the clothes you wore,” he says. “That’s not the issue anymore. Now it’s, ‘Where’s your kid? What’s your kid doing?’ ”

Cardwell is familiar with Elkind’s work and says he has long-shared the same concerns. “If you’re signing your child up for soccer and baseball and karate because other parents you know seem to be doing all these things, that’s not a very good reason,” Cardwell says. “There’s a word for that. It’s called ‘herd think.’ That’s where the only motivation for doing something is that everyone else is doing it.”

“Sometimes, I think parents are trying to relive their childhoods through their children’s activities,” says Joanne Green of Dallas, a hospital business development manager who tries to keeps her eight-year old daughter’s and five-year-old son’s activities to a minimum. Citing an acquaintance whose social life seems to center around her own daughters’ multiple extra-curricular involvements, Green says: “It’s like she’s living vicariously through her daughter’s activities, signing her up for anything and everything that the other moms she socializes with have their kids in. It’s very cliquish, really. The motivation here seems to be making sure that her daughter belongs to the ‘in crowd.’ ”

“I think a lot of people fall into the trap of trying to do too much,” Ellis-Farmer opines. “Especially women who give up high-powered careers to be stay-at-home moms. I think they may still feel motivated to over-achieve, and they do that by getting involved in everything and doing the same for their kids.”

“We’re a very fad-oriented culture and that applies to child-rearing as well as to fashion,” Cardwell adds. “But fads come and go and putting your child in certain activities isn’t the same as just choosing a restaurant. If parents will reflect on whether an activity is something their child would benefit from rather than just signing up because their friends or neighbors are doing it, they’ll be a step ahead.”

“We see a lot of parents who are pushing their kids to be in a zillion activities,” Johnson says. And at the other end of the spectrum, highly social kids may want to join everything and she says it’s up to the parents to decide how it fits with the family’s needs. “Ideally, the kids should find their own activities,” Johnson advises. “It’s best to let the child make the choices, then the parents can sort through what fits with the family schedule and what doesn’t. … Parents will drive themselves crazy trying to let their kids do everything they want. You just can’t do it all.”

With a masters degree in psychiatric nursing, Johnson commonly addresses many of these issues in a Stress Survival Skills” presentation offered as part of a CMC speaker’s bureau program. “As a parent, you have to be aware of what fits in with the family’s needs — and what doesn’t,” Johnson adds. “It’s perfectly okay for you to say, ‘That doesn’t work for us right now. We need some downtime.’ ”

Green, noting that she tries to keep her kids’ schedules light, says they have weekly soccer commitments and monthly Indian Princess and Indian Prince meetings. “That’s about all I can handle,” she explains. “And if my daughter wouldn’t even have these activities if she weren’t doing well in school first.”

“I refuse to do two activities in one night,” Ellis-Farmer says. “Well, I try really hard to avoid it. … It just proves too much for us.”  Explaining that her eldest daughter needs at least 10 hours of sleep night just to function, she adds: “I don’t think she could hold up to anything more than what we’realready doing. I think she would physically rebel. Besides that, kids need time to just hang out.”

“A crucial part of a child’s development is that they have time for free play,” Cardwell says. That’s unstructured time when they can use their imagination and creativity, building things with blocks and using their minds to entertain themselves and learn how to play independent of others.”  Maybe that involves tying a blankie to her back and being a superhero all day, or perhaps it’s a self-initiated art project that has him turning a pile of newspaper and tape into a supersonic megablaster rocketship. Experts say the end result is not as important as the process itself. But, TV time, although often categorized as a relaxing free-time activity, does not fit this bill.

“TV is chewing gum for the brain,” Cardwell explains. “You’re a passive recipient of information. It’s not active or interactive, so it’s not a beneficial as free time.”  Unfortunately, he adds, many of these same kids with heavily structured lives spend a large chunk of their “downtime” parked in front of the TV during their rare moments at home.

According to the experts, letting kids hang around the house and feeling a little bored isn’t all that bad a thing. Pretty soon, Johnson says, their brains will start to work and they’ll start to amuse themselves. “We always hear the old expression about kids needing to just be kids, and it’s so very true.”

“Kids need that time for unstructured play,” Cardwell adds. “There was a book out some years back called “ ‘Where did you go?’ ‘Out.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” That’s really what we’re talking about here.”

Neither Cardwell nor Johnson are anxious to point their fingers at parents and say, “You’re doing too much” or “You’ve got your kid overscheduled,” but they do warn parents to consider their choices carefully and be clear in their own minds about their motivations. It’s not really a good parent/bad parent issue, Johnson explains. It’s about time management and reflecting on one’s choices and deciding what the family can handle and what it can’t.

Barlen admits to responding to peer pressure and signing her kids up for activities because of her conversations with other parents at school functions. “I wouldn’t have put my kids in a lot of these things if it hadn’t been for my PTA involvements,” she explains. “When parents are standing around together, waiting for their kids, there’s a lot of word-of- mouth information about the activities that are around.” However, she also says she doesn’t sign up “just to sign up,” but rather, considers her kids’ interests and abilities when contemplating new activities.

In his book, Elkind warns that a new generation of parents have inadvertently stepped up what he terms an “assault on childhood” — misconstruing the much-publicized research about critical brain development taking place during the first five years of life and using it as license to enroll kids in every program or class they can. Further, he maintains that “there’s no reason for a child to take any kind of lesson before age 6 to 7.”

A lot of parents seem to think their children have to play these sports or join those dance classes when they’re very young, Johnson agrees. “But who says they have to play them when they’re six or seven? I think there’s a feeling among parents that (their kids) won’t be able to catch up if they start later.” She says this is a big factor in getting over-committed and overscheduled when the kids are still in the early elementary years.

“There’s a lot more pressure to have kids try things early on because we’re afraid they won’t have a chance to excel if we don’t,” Ellis-Farmer opines. “Most of us start off thinking we’ve giving them this big advantage by starting them early but actually, that’s crap. If they start (an activity) later when they’re more coordinated, they’ll catch up with the one’s who’ve been doing it since they were two in a heartbeat. … I think what’s really happening is this is our generation’s way of giving our kids more than what we had as kids. Since things were pretty good for us and our parents gave us most of the things we needed, our way of outdoing that is to give our children all these extras.”

Noting that others might see her life as “a bit crazy” right now, Barlen says she just looks at it terms of “the big picture” and the fact that the child-rearing years represent a short and special period of her life. “This is the only time that I’m going to be doing this. Pretty soon, they’ll be driving themselves to where they want to go. But while they’re young, I don’t want them to miss opportunities.”

“Some families have a bigger tolerance for multiple activities,” Johnson says, especially if both parents are actively involved in the logistics of getting kids where they need to be. “I don’t think there’s a magic number for a family’s extra-curricular choices. Each family has to determine that and decide what they can manage and what they can’t.”

“As a general rule,” Cardwell adds, “I’d say one or two really great structured activities should be plenty for anyone.” To keep a handle on a zany family schedule, Johnson says stay-in-the-car moms may have to delegate driving duties to spouses, do some creative scheduling with various class offerings and turn “wait-time” into one-on-one time with younger siblings.

“When my youngest was itty-bitty, I was always carting him off to one of his older brothers’ games and I kind of felt like he spent more time in his carseat than in my arms” Barlen says. Because of that, she says she tried to compensate for it by trying to work in some one-on-one playtime with him while sitting there in the bleachers.

This is a big issue for parents with more than one child,” Johnson says. “That’s why when you’re choosing involvements, it’s very important to consider what’s available for them while the other kid is participating in the structured activity. … Is there a playground nearby or can you bring a game for the two of you to play together while you’re waiting. It takes some planning ahead and you just have to think, ‘How can we use the time creatively.’ ”

Ellis-Farmer offers this example of creative scheduling: Her eldest daughter’s two-hour jazz, tap & ballet class was proving problematic because the dance studio was inconveniently located. “It wasn’t worth it to double back home and put the other kids through all that drive time, but two hours was too long for us to sit there waiting.” So, with a bit of research, she found a place nearby where her son could take a gymnastics class. It started a little later than her daughter’s dance session and wrapped up just in time for them to swing back and pick her up.

Some might call that an unusual reason for enrolling a child in a scheduled activity, but Ellis- Farmer says, “Well, he enjoyed it and it saved my sanity, so we thought it worked out pretty well.”

Johnson offers the opinion that although families adept at multi-tasking and handling heavily structured schedules may do a lot more than others and feel completely comfortable with it, they also ought to remember that it’s “okay to say no” to additional time commitments. “The parents who tend to be the busiest also tend to be the ones who volunteer to do more or allow themselves to get roped into doing even more,” Johnson says. “Sometimes they don’t know where to draw the line and they don’t know how to say ‘No’ when other parents ask them to get more involved — like being the coach or a scout leader or heading up a PTA committee. “But saying ‘yes’ only has value if you sometimes say ‘no.’ ”

“You just have to pick you stresses,” Barlen adds.