Dr. Paul Schwartz
Kids become more confident in their skills when they do things on their own.
All parents share the same goal for their children;
to help them grow and develop the requisite skills to become an independent
autonomous adult.
However, today many professionals believe we are doing too
much for our children and inadvertently curtailing these two desired
developmental tasks.
The belief is that many of today’s parents are
either structuring a barrage of activities for their children with independent
play being sacrificed, or doing things for their children that their children
should be doing for themselves.
Rather than changing from their school clothes
and running out to play, today’s kids check their text messages, e-mails, social
media, or the family planner to access their “daily schedule.”
If your family’s
date calendar on the kitchen refrigerator looks like a spread sheet for a
corporate takeover, and your family’s planning and connections for the day are reminiscent
of an episode from “Mission Impossible,” maybe you are pushing your kids too
hard and doing too much for them!
The warning Dr. David Elkind issued to us over 30
years ago in his landmark work “The Hurried Child” (developed today into the
“Hurried Child Syndrome”) was clear. The pressure to grow up fast and to
achieve early and continuously has become a fabric of middle class America.
Elkind
relates that we have no room today for “late bloomers,” children who don’t
achieve success early or high enough are looked at as inept. The prevailing
belief has become: “If my child has trouble doing it himself, I’ll do it for
him.”
It is falsely believed all failure and anxiety should be alleviated or
removed at all cost or the child’s self esteem will suffer.
Most parents have the best of intentions in offering
the multitude of activities their children engage in, they are attempting to offer
their child anything while also shielding them from failing. As one mother put
it, “You want your child to have everything you never had and not experience
the hardships of growing up.”
Parents want their children to have rich happy
childhoods, not recognizing that many children are reacting to this “overbooking”
with adult levels of stress as well as feeling that they should be rewarded for
anything they do.
This push for success has made “parenting the most
competitive adult sport” says Alvin Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist and author of “The
Overscheduled Child.”
He says we are trying to professionalize childhood and that
today there is no world that is solely a child’s world. There is no place in a
child’s life where the adults haven’t intruded or assisted.
Although there is no total agreement among experts
about “how much is too much,” there is concern among professionals that there
are real and potential problems in a number of child development areas.
Many educators and psychologists are concerned that
schedules and supervision and parent involvement have frequently replaced
spontaneity and autonomy. These rigid regimens and the high expectations for
children are producing passive and pressured kids.
Those “hurried children” may
be forgetting how to have fun, and are also losing their creativity along the
way.
This goal of parents to elevate self-esteem by
developing well rounded Renaissance children who engage in many areas may inadvertently
be preventing their children from achieving mastery in an area of choice: their
choice!
Kids become more confident in their skills when they do things on their
own. Family relationships also appear to be damaged by running from one
scheduled activity to another. There is no down time. As one critic put it, “There
isn’t much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen
spontaneously. There isn’t room for family down-time, time to relax” — that
lazy alone time when ideas about self can blossom.
As parents, the greatest gift we can give our
children is our time, not more lessons.
Paul Schwartz, PhD., is a professor of
psychology and education at Mount Saint Mary College.
Other articles by Paul Schwartz