Remember when child experts whipped us all into a frenzy about how today’s kids are overscheduled and it was harming their delicate little psyches? Well, Time Magazine wants you to know that it’s actually okay; that was just a myth:

[L]ast year a team led by Joseph Mahoney of the Yale psychology department wrote a paper for the journal Social Policy Report showing that most of the scheduling is beneficial: kids’ well-being tends to improve when they participate in extracurriculars. The paper notes that only 6% of adolescents spend more than 20 hours a week in organized activities. And there’s no consistent evidence that even these enthusiasts are worse off. Instead they report better well-being and less drug use. They even eat meals with their parents more often than those who don’t participate at all.

While I find the article as a whole fascinating (and you should definitely read the whole thing, particularly if you seem to be spending a lot of time in the car, schlepping kids here and there), the curmudgeon in me wants to know what happened to moderation.

First we’re told kids are doing too much. It’s not good for them! Kids need time to be kids! And the hand-wringing commenced; Little Johnny was perhaps losing his childhood to squeezing Boy Scouts in-between basketball and clarinet lessons, but there were college applications to think about, you know, just ten years away.

Now this take in Time (which is in fact titled “The Overscheduled Child Myth” just in case it wasn’t abundantly clear how the author feels) is not content to say “it may not be that simple,” but goes so far as to say that research says extracurriculars are good, end of story.

Hey, I’m all for kids having organized activities. I do my own share of toting the kids here and there, and I definitely see the merit in a variety of extracurriculars. But I’ll say it again: Where’s the moderation? The Time article touts the benefits of kids being involved in a variety of activities, pays brief lip service to a few of the drawbacks, and then concludes that when there is talk of “needing a break” it’s really the parents wanting a break, because the kids are just fine.

Whatever. Moderation in all things, says I. (And maybe some other people.) We like to take a Saturday now and then to stay in our pajamas until noon. We like to tuck in for an at-home movie night on a regular basis, which sometimes involves foregoing another, more social, activity. Do I need the break? Of course. But I think it’s good for the kids, too.

Besides, I think part of my job as a mom is to teach my children the important things. Like that a life with no time for cartoons is not a life worth living.

Take that, Time.

[image courtesy of Dewey Does]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under Kid Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.