One of the greatest threats to children’s health today is the problem of over-scheduling. Many parents strongly encourage their children to excel in everything including school, sports, and extracurricular activities. This excessive pressure can lead to both physical and psychologically harmful consequences.
For many parents, over-scheduling their children is appealing because it gives the parent a sense of control over their children’s future happiness. Dr. Alvin Rosenfield, a child psychiatrist, coined the term “hyper-parenting” to describe the parental syndrome of near fanatical devotion to a child’s success and the intense parental guidance that will make children “winners.” Co-author of the Over-Scheduled Child; Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, Dr. Rosenfield notes that family time is being sacrificed in many families in order to fill the child’s time with activities designed for “success” later in the child’s life. Dr. Rosenfield sights one study which indicates that unstructured children’s activities have declined by 50% over the past 20 years, family dinners have declined 33%, and family vacations have decreased by 28%.
The following are some tips from Rosenfield and other mental health professionals designed to reduce the parenting trap of over-programming children.
• Encourage children to see balance between work and play as one of life’s greatest virtues.
• Make balance a priority in the family’s life and place a premium on time spent together. Create strong relationships between family members, and strive for open, un-pressured communication between family members.
• Weigh carefully the addition of each new activity in the child’s life. Is the activity something your child really wants to do or is it perhaps an extension of the parents’ unfulfilled dreams and aspirations?
• Serve as a parental model for relaxation, enjoyment of leisure activities, “quiet times,” and the ability to “do nothing and do it slowly.”
Have fun with children in a playful, creative and imaginative way. Don’t make
competition a necessity in every activity and spend time with children with no goal in mind other than the pleasure of spending time together. Children need to know that they are loved for nothing more than who they are, not what they can do, achieve, or perform. Remember that childhood is not a graded performance but a preparation for a balanced life.
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