Read an Excerpt

The Over-scheduled Child

Avoiding The Hyper-Parenting Trap

St. Martin's Press

With the Best Intentions

Kathy and Paul are a little anxious. After three years of trying, they are thrilled to finally be parents, and Julia is a delightful eight month old with a wonderful disposition. But lately they have noticed that Julia isn't developing at anywhere near the pace of her cousin Andrew who, although a month younger, is already crawling and even saying Ma-Ma and Da-Da. "I'm trying to be calm about all of this," says Kathy. "The pediatrician tells me that her development is well within the normal range ... but I'm worried that maybe Julia is bored and will become lazy. She's home alone with the sitter all day. I really want her to be smart." So she and Paul sit down to order a kit that includes videos, books, and a chart to track a baby's development. It seems like a good program to ask the sitter to follow since the ad promises it will "nurture and enrich the development of your child's intellect."

Tate, age twelve, is one heck of a hockey player. He started skating at two. At first, his father, a former prep school hockey star himself, did the teaching. A few months later, Tate started formal lessons. By age seven, Tate showed real promise and started playing in his New Jersey town's Youth Hockey Program on a demanding schedule. Tate is so good now, he's on the county all-star team and plays aggressive hockey year-round. He has four practices a week, with early morning ice times and Saturday games. For tournaments and championship games he has traveled as far as Virginia and Maine. Next year the coach wants him to practice six days a week. Sure, the time commitment is large — not only for Tate, but also for his parents, who attend every game, and for his younger sister, Morgan, who has to go too. But his mother, Elaine, says, "I really enjoy watching him play. And besides," she adds ruefully, "he still needs me to tie his skates for him. Of course he knows how to tie them, but most kids he plays with are fifteen and can get their laces much tighter. I don't want him to be at a disadvantage just because he's younger."

Seeking out a curriculum for an eight month old? Scheduling a seven year old's week so tightly that the grown-up in charge needs a Palm Pilot to keep track? Structuring an adult life around a commitment to tie laces on a twelve year old's hockey skates?

Sure sounds hyper — so long as we are talking about other parents. But when it's our own child's future we are trying to get just right, it's a little different. What good parent would not spend $79.95 for enrichment materials that promise some extra stimulation, especially for a kid we're a little worried might be lagging behind? We may be busy already, but if our child has some particular talent or a hankering to try a new activity, and we can find a tiny window of time through which to squeeze it into our schedule, why not give it a go? And what parent wouldn't help his child tighten his skate laces if that small effort turns out to make a big difference to him because hockey is so important in his life? And to be perfectly frank, his prowess with a puck gives us a real charge too.

Meanwhile, though, as we labor ceaselessly, sincerely, and earnestly at doing all the right things to get our children off to a great start in life, many of us moms and dads are feeling overworked, overwhelmed, and underappreciated. Of course we love our kids. We want the world for them and would do just about anything to give them what they need to succeed, first in their little-kid worlds and later in the grown-up game of Life. Yet in trying so hard to do everything we can for them, many of us (including yours truly, the authors) aren't sure when to say when. We sense that our family lives are out of whack, but we aren't sure why. We know we are doing too much for our kids, but don't know where it might be okay to cut back — especially since every time we pick up the paper, turn on the news, or try to lose ourselves in the pages of a magazine, someone else is adding something new to the list of things we are supposed to be doing for our children to make sure they turn out right.

We authors do it too. One of us recalls how, as a young and inexperienced mother, it seemed vitally important to provide only the most natural of diets for her baby daughter — nothing but breast milk and homemade, organically grown baby food, chopped and steamed in large batches, frozen in individual-sized portions. The effort was huge but theoretically worthwhile: All those reports linking pesticides and food additives to allergies and childhood cancers were really scary.

Life so often writes its own ironic endings, however, and as it turned out this same scrupulously fed child turned out to be the one of four children who was constantly sick — eventually requiring daily antibiotics to stave off the many infections that plagued her. In time, her health problems were traced to a genetic immune deficiency, which she eventually outgrew — as her mother also outgrew that naive conviction that life could be controlled and shaped by her own intensive efforts. That sincere, well-intentioned belief is the essence of hyper-parenting.

So often we can afford to relax — even in the face of conventional wisdom, let alone the latest scientific advisories! The other of us had a child who loved chocolate, and as a young child begged for some each evening before dinner. Although a little fearful of the nutritional and dietetic implications, her parents nonetheless decided to try it her way. What happened? She remains slender, and ten years later has missed a total of one day of school because of illness.

But it is tough to "try" to be relaxed, especially when we so desperately fear being negligent. What we parents really need as much as, or perhaps even more than, all that important advice about how to raise our children is a reminder that no one ever gets it all just right — and that most children turn out well anyway. Not perfect, but good enough. And, as we will see in chapters to come, that is the best we can hope for anyway.

We authors don't think we are looking at the past through chic pink glasses when we reminisce about how much simpler everyday life used to be — at least for white, middle-class families. Not perfect, mind you, but certainly less complicated. Most of us attended neighborhood public schools, not pricey private ones. We played outside with the kids in the neighborhood; we didn't have private voice lessons or play in organized lacrosse leagues. Our mothers had no need to color code our family calendars to track activities for each family member.

Life seemed reasonably predictable. Our parents had a vision of themselves as a strong generation that had survived the Great Depression, triumphed over evil in World War II, and saved South Korea from the jaws of communism. They had so much to be proud of. Pre-Vietnam America was pretty as a postcard, the best country in the world — at least as far as its white, middle-class citizens were concerned. "We the people" were decent, God-fearing, generous, fair, and law-abiding; our parents found plenty of safe, sunny, sane places to live. Of course there were racism, dysfunctional families, and alcoholic, abusive, and/or depressed parents, then as now, more than anyone then would have guessed. But because problems were kept sealed behind tightly shut doors, they did not disturb our "nice" image of ourselves.

We suffer no such comforting delusions today — in fact, quite the contrary. We get bombarded with news stories that scare the daylights out of us. We authors often find ourselves turning off the news in our own houses — not only is it too scary for our smallest children, but the truth is that it keeps us up at night too. The schoolroom massacres, wartime atrocities, and weather disasters are awful, no question. But it's not only the random horror of the events themselves that raise our blood pressure; humans have always suffered from evil acts and destruction, both natural and man-made.

What's uniquely stressful for today's families is the way that every single report of an awful event is first delivered directly into our living rooms and made up close and personal. The 24-hour news channels give us minute-to-minute coverage, intermittently punctuated by a consultation with an "expert," who does his or her best to provide a tidy explanation of its root causes (though the truth is that some of these events are just plain inexplicable), along with a set of how-to instructions on what you need to do to keep this from happening in your own life. The implication is that with enough effort you can.

So, whenever some horrible tragedy befalls a child, we are deluged with a flood of stories that examine why it happened, whatever it was: What oversights led to a toddler's fatal plunge from a skyscraper window, what didn't happen to prevent an eight year old from drowning while away at summer camp, which factors may have fueled the transformation of a seemingly normal high school student into a mass murderer. In one way, such stories soothe our angst by providing explanations that serve to make such events seem less arbitrary; in another way, however, they stoke our anxiety by giving us a list of the things we parents can do to keep such tragedies from ruining our own lives. We can invest in swimming lessons, carefully research the safety record of the summer camps we are considering, toss all violent video games in the trash — and lots more. Those of us who aren't taking every conceivable precaution begin to wonder, should we? Ought we change all the rules in our house? We wonder whether our children are in serious danger. Sometimes they might be; usually they are not. Some events are neither predictable nor preventable.

By stoking our insecurities about our children's future and appealing to our anxieties about whether we know how to be good parents, the media is profoundly affecting how we live our lives and raise our families. They are persuading us that just as we have to work far longer and harder at our paying jobs, so too should we work longer and harder at child rearing. There is no time for downtime! In a number of ways, our magazines, newspapers, books, and TV programs are even reshaping our sense of what is real and possible.

It's easy and fashionable to blame the media for every societal problem, from violence and drug abuse to the breakdown of family values. But despite their protestations to the contrary, we don't see them as just convenient scapegoats. The media exposes children, adolescents, and families to unnecessarily violent, ugly, and oversexualized images of life (and others that are ridiculously sugarcoated). That's bad enough. But we authors believe that the information the media transmits indirectly may have an even greater impact on the way we parents are raising our children today. They put before each and every one of us an image of what we have come to accept as the right way to live. These highly contagious and subliminal metamessages about family life and parenting have dramatically altered how we look at the world. In our opinion, it is near impossible to overestimate the media's effect on our family lives.

It bears repeating and emphasizing. Directly and indirectly, in ways we are often completely unaware of, the media is poisoning our view of what family life should be like at the dawn of a new millennium. It portrays the world "out there" as brutal and unpredictably dangerous, a malicious maelstrom from which we must provide constant protection. It blurs the lines between fiction and fantasy, encouraging us, and our children, to believe that annihilation lurks everywhere yet that perfection and absolute safety are within our reach.

The "reality" we are presented with is often far more disturbing than even the worst fantasy shows. Nothing on television is scarier than the evening news. Every place is dangerous; no one is ever really safe. As we — parents and children — sit passively taking it all in, we are presented with a ceaseless sense of urgency and immediacy, a constant threat of death lurking just around the next corner or in the next bite of food. The sands shift constantly beneath our feet, leaving us with no place to stand that feels solid. Vigilance is the order of the day; we cannot ever afford to relax ourselves or our standards.

We are urged to teach our children to beware of people they don't know, even though the actual number of children harmed or abducted by strangers is minuscule. Scary health reports are sensationalized: "Cafeteria lunches contain flesh-eating bacteria!" Parents are made to feel irresponsible for serving a child a hot dog, which might cause leukemia or harbor listeria. An ice cream sundae is sinful — all that fat and sugar! The facts may change but month to month, the sense of urgency remains a constant. Because with no acknowledgment of the contradiction, a major story the very next month tells viewers definitively that the absence of fat in a toddler's diet may impede brain development and that eating chocolate may add years to our life expectancy.

By their very nature, the news programs distort our sense of time and frequency, making disasters seem common, as inevitable as a change in the weather. Seeing these images over and over alters our perceptions of just how safe we are and how unlikely such disasters are to occur in our own lives. Plenty of people believe that cancer is rampant among children, when in reality it is quite rare. The Challenger blew up once, but with our own eyes we saw it explode literally hundreds of times.

Unlike fairy tales, which begin "Beyond the seven mountains and over the three great seas," a brilliant distancing mechanism to keep children from being frightened since these events happened long ago and far away, clips on the local news highlight horrors that happen just around the corner to people who look like you and me. Every day people just like us are gunned down on the streets, or are car jacked, or have scaffolds fall from skyscrapers onto their heads. With our own eyes and the help of a crackerjack cameraman, we listen to the neighbor's surprise, we witness the mother's tears. We see their grief, share their pain. By being exposed in this way, we become unwitting participants in the tragedy, silent victims a continent away. We have imagined how it feels to have a child abducted, a daughter raped and mutilated. And so we react, by fingerprinting our families and buying one more bolt for the front door.

Dr. Spock's down-to-earth child-care manual became a bestseller a generation ago. He worked to reassure parents, telling them that they knew more than they thought they did. On the other hand, today's media and some contemporary advertisers work hard to convince us of the opposite. Knowing just how to get our attention, the media use anxiety-provoking techniques so they can tell us how to be better parents. Not only do we know very little, but crucial new information is so complex and is being gathered so quickly that we absolutely must tune in or log on to keep up with the latest developments — or risk being a failure at life's most important job.

The media shows us again and again that perfection is possible: You can do this; you should do that. Serious advice follows the cue. Inspirational stories recount how, with the right efforts started early enough, each of us can raise a superstar like, say, golf prodigy Tiger Woods. These stories imply that every child should be above average, as though this wasn't, by definition, impossible.

---

Excerpted from The Over-scheduled Child by Alvin Rosenfeld, Nicole Wise. Copyright © 2000 Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., and Nicole Wise. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---