We put my son is coach pitch baseball this year and my daughter in soccer. They both are in swim lessons. Both soccer and baseball are two nights a week, I’ll be running around all summer.
I know kids who take martial arts - little kids - who need to go three times a week. Similar issues with dance.
We aren’t all trying to raise little Olympic atheletes - some of us just want park and rec t-ball.
(But often it IS the parents fault and they need to be slapped).
But how will they get into Harvard, be the next Tiger Woods, and dominate all the other kids in this little passive-aggressive materialistic society we have created?
Jr. Dee and I went to an informational meeting about Cub Scouts at his school last year. I asked afterwards if he would like to be a scout. His response was, “No, I just want to be a regular kid.”
He knows that if there is a sport he’s intrigued by or he becomes interested in a musical instrument we can talk about lessons but for now he seems most interested in riding his bike and playing “Spies” or “Knights” with the neighbors.
My job puts me in proximity to moms like the ones Incubus describes. One of them asked me one day which speech therapist my son would be seeing. This was not a woman that I knew socially. She had never met my son or heard him speak. There has never been anything about his speech which caused me concern. She asked in a manner which suggested that of course everyone has a speech therapist. In that town I guess everyone does but I’m not from there. I just work there, and worry for the children who need their own filofaxes.
When I was little there were swimming lessons, after school sports programs (the type where you didn’t need to be athletic), league bowling and arts and crafts classes. Summers were filled with day camp and reading. Once I entered junior high school, though, there was a great pressure from the school to do everything to get into a good college. I got really rather tired of it. It took me until my last year in college to truly care about any activities at all.
My daughter’s elementary school segregates the kids by grade level for lunch & recess. I think it’s a good idea - there’s no worry about the older kids picking on the younger ones or not letting the little kids have access to playground equipment. Recess isn’t structured, however they do only get about 20 minutes once a day.
When I was growing up (born in 1979), we got 20 minutes of recess once a day after lunch. My gifted program met once a week and we 30-40 minutes after lunch. That time was so boring to our overactive minds we usually got into trouble instead of coming up with something clever to do.
We were always segregated by grade level because the playground wasn’t that big, and more than 100 students at a time would’ve totally over crowded things. There was a seperate playground for kindergarteners, with smaller equipment that the big kids weren’t allowed to play on.
Incubus, Incubus, Incubus, don’t you realize that children are merely puppets owned by their parents, who have a legal and moral right to use them to fulfill personal dreams? Children aren’t people, with feelings or nothing. They’re just tools and objects to be machined into place.
Seriously, though, I imagine all the tutoring and special classes in the world just don’t help much in the long run. You can teach people a skill, but not the desire to use it. You can’t teach intelligence, either.
Because the reality of survival/success prohibits any real fun most of the time for most of the people. That said…as an adult you expect it. As a kid you shouldn’t have to worry about it all that often.
A few years ago, Ivygirl wanted to take ballet. I took her to a class and let her observe while I waited in the waiting room.
Two other SuperMoms were discussing their children. One was complaining because last Friday night, her daughter didn’t want to go out to dinner, she just wanted to order pizza. It turns out the girl was taking ballet, tap, gymnastics and soccer. I’m sitting there thinking, “And when does she do her homework?”
Yeesh, folks, adults don’t want to do a lot of running around after a long day at work. What makes you think the kidlets want to be hauled hither and yon to stroke your ego? And don’t give me this crap about, “But she WANTS to do these things!” She’s a child. Her eyes are bigger than her stomach, so she will overload her plate. It’s up to you, as the parents, to help her manage her time.
BTW, my kids only had ONE after school activity at a time.
This sort of thing really pisses me off. Back when I was a kid, we had the opposite problem–my mom felt childhood was a time to play and wouldn’t let us join more than one activity at a time.
Often times, the parents who do this think they have to so that the child can get into a great college some day. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Quality of activities matters more than quantity. Mom always left me plenty of slacker time, and later on in life, I did the same thing. Don’t play an instrument, don’t play a sport, don’t speak a foreign language (other than a little high school French). I still got into Harvard. [/bragging]
These parents need to take a chill pill. These kids have their whole adult lives to be overworked and underappreciated.
There was another child who came in more recently. Normally this kid is very outgoing and loud, a little on the hyperactive side but motivated nonetheless. One day he kept stalling about starting his lessons, and concerned, I asked, “Is everything ok?” He looked like he was on the verge of a meltdown, so I suggested we go in the office and sit down to talk, that way he wouldn’t feel embarassed if he needed to have a good cry.
As soon as we got in the office he started bawling. He said that between school and soccer practice and Score he doesn’t have any time to play. As soon as he is done with one thing, he has to get up and do something else, there isn’t any ‘me’ time. I comforted him as best as I could, reassuring him that the older he gets, the more he will have control over what he does- and how important it is to try to enjoy the things that you do in life.
Because he was kind of a wreck at that point, I felt like it would be counterproductive to make him sit and do lessons for an hour, so I called his mom and explained the situation, and he took the day off. Better he take the day off to kind of cool down and get a little bit of his sanity, than to be so turned off by the tutoring that he never wants to come back again.
I wasn’t in any extracurricular activities in high school, only took French up to ninth grade, didn’t play an instrument or a sport, et cetera. I still got into a decent state school, and was accepted to MIT and Caltech for grad school.
My sister, on the other hand, was in all sorts of activities in high school, at the urging of our mother. She ended up going:
to a state school very similar to the one I went to, if not less prestigious
She felt very burned-out by the time she got to college- she’d expended so much energy trying to get into college, that she just didn’t feel like she could keep it up, or wanted to keep it up (though she did graduate with better-than-decent grades, just wasn’t a super-achiever like she was in high school).
I do understand exactly where you are coming from Incubus. Kids these days just do not have the fortitude to cope with rigorous personal development.
My children often complain by 9pm that they want to play and sleep more. Well they have been playing for the last 3 hours, for gods sake - chello and trumpet . And tai-chi is playing too. Since art classes finnish at 8 on mondays they get to go to bed early then. Perhaps ballet after indonesian classes is pushing it a bit on Friday nights, but it is the only time the PCBC runs classes. And how do you think my wife feels having to run the kids from soccer to archery and swimming every Saturday morning. It almost ruins our weekend. Margaret Thatcher only slept 4 hours a day. If you get your kids into the routine early look at the greatness they may acheive.
I did activities, but I didn’t worry about being well-rounded or what it would look like on my resume. Just did what sounded fun (and not too taxing). Mind you, I was ambitious. I headed student organizations in high school and college. I just never took it too seriously and balanced work with play.
Actually, I do agree that overworking a child like Incubus describes is a form of emotional abuse. I think the parents are probably well-intentioned, and I’m not saying it’s a case for CPS, but obviously this kid is suffering.
At least they get to do different things. Here in Canada, we have Hockey Parents.
Mrs. RickJay’s uncle is a Hockey Parent to his son. Little Billy (not his real name; his real name is Micro Billy) is in hockey winter, spring, summer and fall. He plays a schedule of 120, maybe 140 games a year, counting all the leagues he’s in; that is more than an NHL player would play in a non-strike-ruined season. Plus hockey camps, hockey practices, hockey workshops, hockey hockey hockey hockey. Up at 4, 5 AM every day to make it to the rink.
The kid’s 11. He doesn’t yet use a fork and knife to cut his own food. I don’t know what that has to do with it but it seems relevant somehow.
The uncle is simply obsessed with his son becoming an elite hockey player. Oh, and by the way, the kid has about as much a chance of becoming a pro hockey player as I do of becoming the Queen of Belgium; he’s small, weak, slow and untalented. So what the point of it all is, I cannot imagine.
Hmm…I suddenly get this odd, eerie feeling that I shouldn’t worry so much about social security being there for my old age as I should be worried about staking out an isolated spot in the mountains before all the good caves get taken. :eek:
Well, I hate to be the voice of dissent, but it’s quite possible a lot of the kids are doing the activities because they enjoy them. When I was 10 I did gymnastics 3 days a week, ballet 2 and jazz 1 - because I wanted to. I didn’t have one spare afternoon, and I loved it. I never played playstation or whatever those things are when I was a kid. I was obsessed with gym and ballet. When I was at home, I was practising my ballet and gym.
And, really, I didn’t turn out too bad.
But, when the parents are calling the shots, you’re right, it’s a different matter.
If you’re not having any fun in your life as an adult, you’re not doing it right. I refuse to believe that being a responsible adult, with all the duties that entails, means all fun has to stop.
