If societal pressures have ever made you feel riddled with guilt as you pulled in the drive-thru to feed your child dinner at 8:30 p.m. on thre way home from soccer practice, you’re going to like this.
There was a time, one that many of you probably remember, when kids didn’t spend too much time in scheduled activities outside of school.
Kids would get their fill of sports and music and art at school, then come home and roam the great outdoors with their friends until mom called for dinner.
Everyone would enjoy a meal together at the family dinner table, and maybe watch a family TV show before retiring to bed.
Somewhere along the line we decided we had to keep up with the Chinese kids who were learning to play the violin at age 3, or get a jump on creating a sports star who could combat the rising costs of college with a full-ride scholarship by signing up for football by age 4.
Suddenly we had a generation of kids who were on the go every waking moment.
The result? All that time of free, unstructured, creative, imaginative play was suddenly gone.
As parents we were vilified for handing our child dinner to eat in the car on the way to practice, and for creating children who were as stressed about their after school schedule as a trauma surgeon in the ER following a mass disaster.
Where We Went Wrong in Thinking Schedules Are Bad
If there was a time when all the scheduled activities were robbing our children of their childhood, that time has passed.
Fact is, kids today spend the majority (if not all!) of their unscheduled time staring at a screen of some sort.
Whether it’s TV, a cell phone, a computer screen, or a game console, some form of screen has replaced the magical memories of free time we likely have from our childhood.
And that type of down time is not better than just about any scheduled activity you could sign your child up for.
There’s no controversy in the research here.
Children involved in outside activities reap positive social, behavioral, and psychological benefits from those activities.
Just a few of the benefits include supportive peer and adult relationships, increased self-esteem, a sense of purpose, development of future educational and occupational aspirations, and improvement in math and verbal skills.
On the other hand, screen time is anything but “down time.”
Studies show that screen time is stressful, anxiety-producing, addictive, and causes various development concerns due to the effect it has on your child’s brain.
Given the alternatives then, dinner on the go so you’re not late to piano lessons or lacrosse practice wins hands down over seeking a less scheduled life.
How to Determine Whether Your Child is Overscheduled
That’s not to say your child can’t be overscheduled.
Here’s some things to look at when determining whether you’re providing your child with the right balance.
1. What’s your child doing when she’s not in a scheduled activity?
Maybe you are super mom and you and your super mom group of friends have managed to create an environment when your children are actually getting outdoors, engaging in free and creative play, and enjoying all the benefits of scheduled activities in an unscheduled environment.
If so, keep going and don’t feel any pressure to keep up with anyone else by finding more activities to fill the spaces.
Or maybe your child’s naturally the creative type and is a little introverted. She may find her own activities (with your encouragement) and not need a lot of outside scheduling.
But if the answer to this question is either she’s on a screen or wants to be on a screen, you don’t have over-scheduling problems for the reasons we’ve already talked about.
If your answer is the only time she’s not in a scheduled activity is when she’s sleeping, you may want to rethink at least one of those outside activities.
2. What’s your child’s attitude about her scheduled activities?
This is one of the biggest indicators of whether you’ve got too much going on.
If you’re always having to drag her to practice or nag her to practice her instrument at home, if she’s consistently complaining she’s too tired for her activities, then you’ve either got too much going on or she’s involved in the wrong things.
On the other hand, if she’s generally happy and excited to go, and you see her having a positive experience with her activities, then why mess with a good thing?
3. How many hours a week is your child spending on scheduled activities?
A 2008 report titled The Over-Scheduling Myth concluded that adverse effects from outside activities were seen when kids spent more than 20 hours a week on such activities, or participated in five or more activities simultaneously.
You can use this as a baseline for looking at your child’s schedule, but again, the most important indicator is whether she’s experiencing positive outcomes from her activities.
The study found that those who participated 10 hours a week or less almost always experienced positive benefits, and 15 to 20 hours of participation was “generally associated” with positive development.
The Real Problem is Not the Scheduled Activities
Most likely, it’s not the activities themselves that are having a negative impact on our kids, but our attitudes towards these activities as parents that are leaving them as stressed out as if they’d just lost their last life in a Mario game.
When thinking about whether your child is overscheduled, take a close look at whether you’re putting too much emphasis on his success in the activity.
Maybe he just wants to play baseball for fun, not in hopes of being the next Babe Ruth.
Maybe it’s about the friendships and team building for him, and not whether his team wins the championship.
Maybe he’d like to pull out his trumpet at a party one day for fun, but has no aspirations of being part of the New York Symphony.
Let him decide his level of involvement and support him at that level.
Of course, you don’t want to waste your money if he’s never practicing that trumpet, and you can’t let him drag his feet through baseball practice to the extent that his laziness hurts his team, but that shouldn’t be a problem if he’s in activities he’s truly interested in.
How to Get the Most Out of “Down Time”
Hopefully after looking at your child’s schedule you can see she has more down time than you maybe thought when you were trying to figure out how to get her in bed before midnight.
Because most kids do keep pretty busy, down time remains a very important part of our kids' lives.
We’ve already talked about how screen time is the opposite of down time, yet it’s the preferred down time activity of the vast majority of kids today.
So how do we fight the losing battle of prying our children away from the screens?
Here’s a few tips:
1. Limit where your screens are
Don’t have a screen within arm’s reach at all times.
Follow the "out of site, out of mind" philosophy and either reduce the number of screens you have or put them up when you aren’t using them.
You don’t need a screen in the car.
Make it a rule that the car is a screen-free zone. It’s one of the few times you have your child trapped and can almost force him to talk to you!
Save those built-in DVD players for road trips if you absolutely must use them.
2. Have scheduled blocks for screen time
This avoids the constant battle of whether your child’s been on a screen too long.
Just like he has practice from 6-8, he can have screen time from 3-4.
Setting the expectations may be hard in the beginning, but once he’s used to it, treating screen time like any other scheduled activity won’t be a big deal and will cut down on most of the stress around this issue.
3. Provide Easy Alternatives
Keep other things to do readily available around the house.
Puzzle books, books to read, art supplies, whatever you can get your child interested in.
Have your child help you develop a stash of non-screen activities so he can’t discount the ones you come up with as boring.
The goal here is to never have your child say, “I’m bored and there’s nothing to do but play X-Box.”
Always have another trick you can pull out of your closet or drawer to counter this argument.
Is Your Next Party on the Schedule?
One of the most important dates on the calendar for kids of all ages is their birthday.
At Kids Party Characters, we specialize in filling that day with fun and unique memories that will last a lifetime.
Although we do have over 200 characters for your child to choose from, the best way to guarantee that she gets the characters of her choice, and that we can provide one of our A-list actors to portray that character, is to get your party on your schedule and ours a good eight weeks before it happens.
Booking your party is simple.
Head to KidsPartyCharacters.com, let your child choose her character(s) and any extras she wants, such as face painting, cotton candy, and balloon twisting.
Then give us a call and we’ll take care of the rest.
Also be sure to join us on Facebook for daily updates on all the magic happening at Kids Party Characters, as well as tips and strategies for raising happy and healthy kids.
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