Are Kids so Busy They’re Missing Out on Childhood?

By Anastacia Mott Austin

The idyllic days of childhood: playing with your friends, climbing trees, bickering with your siblings, watching bugs make odysseys across sidewalks, skinning your knees.

These are my memories of childhood. With today’s more stressed and frantic lifestyles, even for kids, I wonder what my own children will remember.

Some parents worry that if their children don’t have a lot of activities to occupy their time, they’ll just watch too much television or become bored. Others feel that their lives are way too overscheduled, but just don’t know what to do about it.

Even the experts disagree. In the January 2007 issue of Pediatrics, a report by Kr. Kenneth R. Ginsburg bemoaned the loss of playtime for children today. Dr. Ginsburg discussed both the benefits of play for children and the effects of having less free time these days. "Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, and to learn self-advocacy skills."

But children today have so much less unstructured time than kids did 20 years ago that the benefits of playtime are being lost, claims Dr. Ginsburg. "…much of parent-child time is spent arranging special activities or transporting children between those activities. In addition to time, considerable family resources are being invested to ensure that the children have what are marketed as the ‘very best’ opportunities."

Other experts don’t agree that these scheduled "opportunities" are bad. Writer John Cloud claimed in his Time article from January of this year that scheduled kids are healthy kids, saying that children who spend time in structured activities have higher self-esteem than those who don’t, and that drug use and teen pregnancy is down among kids who participate in extra-curricular activities.

If you aren’t one of those parents who is rushing your child to violin or choir or soccer practice, tapping your watch after school and frothing at the mouth because you’re already late, snapping at your kid through gritted teeth, "Get in the van!" then surely you know someone who is.

And if you are not one of those parents, I hope you’re watching bugs cross the sidewalk with your child.

My daughter left for an overnight school field trip yesterday, and I felt sucker-punched to realize how much I miss her. Even more sad, I realized that I miss her every day even though we’re both right here. We are so busy that we seem to spend our days planning how not to be late to this or that activity, rather than how to spend our actual time together.

I feel as though I’m watching my children’s lives through one of those time-lapse films showing plants growing: now a tiny seed in the rich, wet soil, now a spindly, reaching plant, now a tall tree, and good-bye.

What do you think your child will remember more? You hissing at her because "We’re late for choir practice, let’s go!" and speeding away in a stress-fest, or the one day when you stopped for just a few moments to watch the clouds that looked like bunnies float by, feeling the warm sun on your bodies?

I want my own children to remember those slower moments not because they were rare, but because they were the threads that wove the fabric of our daily lives—that we knew those moments were the important ones.

As Dr. Ginsburg writes, "Perhaps, above all, play is a simple joy that is a cherished part of childhood."

At least it should be.