Fighting the Urge to Overschedule My Kids
Image by Markus Spiske
By Youngna Park
Youngna Park is the author of Making it Work, a newsletter offering musings for parents, recommendations for kids, and thoughts on the absurdity of it all. She’s also spent 15+ years building digital products for parents and kids, including at the New York Times.
Nine months ago, I wrote an essay about the toddler extracurricular complex and my disdain for the social pressure and competition to participate in a very expensive cycle of weekly 30-60 minute activities in which it’s unclear if anyone is having fun or actually learning anything. It’s a topic I can’t stop thinking about, as my kids both get older and the options get wider and the world opens up to be their extracurricular oyster. Who gets to participate and who wants to participate? Why do we think so many children want to do ballet? Does it count as an extracurricular if I take my kid to Trader Joe’s?
In a standard playground conversation with the parents of my child’s classmates, it quickly comes out that their children are spending anywhere from three to all seven days of the week at different scheduled activities. There’s ballet, gymnastics, art class, soccer, fencing, swimming, piano, vocal lessons, skateboarding, chess, and many more esoteric things that make me wonder if we’re already seeding college applications. One mother comments that piano would be the last to go, and the other adds that for her daughter, it’s gymnastics. I think about my daughter and how she would prefer to be at home building Legos or making homemade zines about gems. I also think about why I’m comparing my children, who are 4 and 6, and what this means about me, them, and the slice of New York we all live in.
“It’s $3,500 for the year, including the end-of-year performance,” one mom says of her daughter’s weekly dance classes, but “the teacher is really wonderful.” I think about trying to get to the other side of Brooklyn for these classes, and who is taking her after school, and what happens when you sign up for the year but then after the second class the kid decides they hate it, as my kids have done more than once.
Recently, the Storq newsletter shared a link to an article by Michaleen Doucleff, a reporter for NPR, who looked into the very western/American orientation of packing our kids’ schedules with activities. She refers to both structured extracurricular activities as well as kid-centric activities, i.e. planning your whole day around going to the playground, play dates (that don’t also involve an adult friendship), children’s museums — places you would only go to because you have a child and are designed to maximize your child’s engagement. She then breaks down the highly propagated myth that lives packed with activities and extracurriculars help kids learn best, and suggests a different path instead:
“Instead of signing up a child for a bunch of activities, wait for them to ask to participate or to show a genuine interest in that activity. For young kids, being with you while doing chores or hobbies is more than enough entertainment — and teaches them how to be a good family member.”
I nod my head because I like this in theory, and know that I have also critiqued my own spouse for entertaining the kids by taking them to the grocery and hardware store on many weekends. What compels me to think they’re better off at soccer and rock climbing than riding around in the cart at the grocery store?
It all feels one narrow step away from the productivity-slash-internalized capitalism trap of adulthood that we’ve spent so much time trying to unwind the last few years, the one that Jenny Odell wrote about so eloquently in How to do Nothing. We seem to accept that adults need to grapple with fractured attention spans, that we need to turn away from the orientation of constantly needing to get things done/prove self-worth through the things we do and do “nothing” — aka things that help hone one’s sense of awareness and solace (bird watching, long nature walks, etc). Yet, what are we teaching kids when they come to expect engaging, scheduled activities day in and day out?
My unconfirmed belief is that we want to nurture boredom and free play, but there’s 1) a deep insecurity that boredom means unproductive and 2) a lot of societal guilt for not centering your children. There’s an urgency for our children’s time to be edifying in a way that a parent can comprehend; for a parent to see that their child has some clearly directed proclivity or passion or exposure to novelty, as though they’re all sitting there waiting for their untapped potential to be discovered. Scheduled activities are a way for parents to feel good about their child’s curiosity being actively nurtured, for them to know their kid is learning how to make/do/hustle, which feels much less risky than chancing your kids to actual boredom and letting them find their own way in this crazy and chaotic world.