Are We Overscheduling Our Kids?

When I was younger, I valued spontaneity. Or rather, I accepted it as a regular part of everyday life. We’d go to Blockbuster and not know what movies or video games might be available. We’d just go and pick something. And when we did, we had no real idea whether our selection would be only good. All we had to go on was the back of the box. Shrug, seems good enough, I’d think to myself.

Now that I’m older — and I’m not sure if it’s something that comes with age, with increasingly elevated anxiety, or by some function of how the online age functions in modern society — I value predictability. Before I go somewhere, I look up the directions on Google Maps. I research what the parking situation is like. Not only do I look up reviews of restaurants, but I’ll hunt down an online menu and already place the order in my head.

And, to some degree, I’m starting to think about my kids’ schedules and lives in the same kind of way.

As a modern parent, I can’t be alone in this. I imagine many (if not most) moms and dads likely think the same kind of way. We want to know what to expect, so we can plan accordingly. But, when I take a step back, I do have to wonder whether we’re going too far and overscheduling our kids. When everything is planned, scheduled, booked and pre-researched, it leaves very little room for spontaneity, no time or space to meander and explore.

They’ve Got to Do Something, Right?

Part of the reason why you might enroll your kids in various camps, teams and activities is to fend off complains of “I’m booooored.” I get that. Believe me, I totally get that. It also helps with the predictability and routine discussed above. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the overwhelming majority (over 83%) of people who responded to my Twitter poll indicated that their kids are enrolled in extracurricular activities. Only three people said their kids were not.

Registration for summer session classes in Burnaby opened up earlier this week. By the time we got around to checking the site, about 6 hours after registration opened, there were no more spots left. Later, I learned that 1,300 people registered in the first 10 minutes. That number hit 5,000 by the three-hour mark. Parents (and their kids?) are eager. The fact that the summer school courses are tuition-free for Burnaby students probably added to the demand.

Seeking Advantages and Opportunities

But, this trend extends far beyond “free” summer school. Today’s parents, particularly the more affluent, feel compelled to give their children “every advantage they never had.” If they have the means to send their kids to soccer, ballet, piano, robotics, gymnastics, science camp and all the rest of it, they’ll likely lean heavily in that direction.

And parents who may not quite have the means to do so will often try to stretch their budgets as much as they can to “make it work,” because they “don’t want their kids to fall behind.”

Somehow, parenting has become a highly competitive sport, whether we’re willing to admit it or not. It starts as early as preschool, when you see that so-and-so is already enrolled in taekwondo. Or such-and-such has her first piano recital this weekend. Comparison is the thief of joy, but we can’t help but to participate in it. Because we don’t want our kids to “fall behind.”

Because we want to feel like we not only “doing enough,” but we’re doing our best to give our kids the best opportunities for the brightest future possible. We don’t want to fall behind. It’s the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon,

Library Visits and Video Games

When I reflect on whether we’re overscheduling our kids, my own frame of reference for comparison is my own childhood. I had zero extracurricular activities when I was my daughter’s age. To the best of my knowledge, my school may or may not have programs available, but surely the local community center would have. And I know my brother took taekwondo for a few years. I did not.

To the best of my recollection, the first time I had anything going on outside of school was around grade 6 when I signed up for the basketball team. While I spent more time riding the pine and draining threes, at least I was there. My high school experience was much the same; we formed a curling team (city champions!) in grade 12. I never took summer school and I didn’t have any lessons outside of school.

My “extracurricular activities” consisted of visiting the library, playing video games, and helping out at my parents’ restaurant. Other people around my age and older may look back fondly at their childhoods, randomly gallivanting around with the neighborhood kids. Or forming lifelong memories at summer camp. That wasn’t me. And I don’t know if I was necessarily any better or worse for it.

But, it goes without saying that the world we live in today is vastly different than the world I inhabited in the ’80s and ’90s. Expectations are different. I feel like the socioeconomic and cultural demographics of my neighbors today are quite different from the largely working-class, immigrant neighborhood of my youth too.

What About Letting Kids Be Kids?

I don’t have answers. Nor did I ever claim that I did. If anything, I just have more questions and I feel a little helpless as to what I can do about them. On the one hand, I want my kids to have a childhood where they’re free to explore and learn in an organic, spontaneous kind of way. We might schedule some activities, but I don’t want to overdo it. On the other hand, I’ve very much internalized this narrative of not letting them “fall behind.” One where they can have everything that I didn’t.

It’s a rock and a hard place, piled on with all the added responsibility of increased cost of living and innumerable daily responsibility. Raising a kid is hard enough. Raising two is harder, and it’s harder still with all the added pressure of the Parental Olympics. How do you manage? Are your kids signed up for multiple extracurricular activities, both inside and outside of school?