For Some Busy Kids, It's All Good

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Keeping Up With the Kids

Helen Williams spends her afternoons running her children to football practice, gymnastics, swimming lessons and piano lessons. Williams says she doesn't think her children have too much on their schedules, but some of her friends worry that Williams might.

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Elaine Wiggins, a mother of two in Annandale, said she tries to accommodate her children's interests but keep them realistic about how much is too much. She and her 14-year-old son recently decided that he could not do both marching band and cross-country this school year. "It's a huge juggling act," Wiggins said.

The recent research is controversial among many who say overscheduling is a major source of childhood stress. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned in 2006 that a hurried lifestyle could create anxiety or contribute to depression for some children.

Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of the "The Overscheduled Child" (2000), said the phenomenon is real and took issue with studies that do not account for the driving time that parents put in or the reality that many families include multiple children with conflicting activities.

"Kids don't get enough sleep; they don't get enough downtime to be creative and thoughtful; they don't have enough hangout time," contended William Doherty, a University of Minnesota professor who has organized citizen-parent initiatives against overscheduling.

Doherty cited several polls that reported children's concerns about their lives' busy pace but welcomed the debate and said it is important to dig deeper and examine exactly which forces converge in stressed-out children and families.

In her research, "The Hurried Child: Myth vs. Reality," Hofferth studied children ages 9 to 12, a group she says is most heavily involved in organized activities. The best off were the 58 percent with what she called a more balanced approach: one or two activities, for less than four hours, over the two days tracked in the study. But highly involved children, about 25 percent, did almost as well, she said.

Hofferth's study relied on interviews with children and parents as well as detailed time-use diaries from 331 youths from white middle- and upper-middle-class families across the nation. Hofferth has studied comparable data for middle- and upper-middle-class African American children, she said, finding it "pretty darn similar."

Of particular concern, she said, were the 17 percent of children from her study with no activities, a group that was more withdrawn and socially immature, with lower self-esteem.

Concern about the uninvolved is shared by Martha Fuentes, a mother of five in Landover Hills, who said her 12-year-old daughter wishes she could join a sports team, a karate class or a swim group -- if only the family could find and afford one.

"When they come home from school, they have nothing," said Fuentes, who takes her youngest children to a nearby park every day, hoping they get exercise and spend less time in front of the television. She added, "They need after-school programs, or something that the kids could go and have fun instead of being in the streets."

Hofferth's findings comport with an earlier, broader study, also using time-use data, led by Joseph L. Mahoney, then at Yale University. In a nationally representative study of 2,125 children ages 5 to 18, Mahoney and his colleagues found 3 percent of children and 6 percent of adolescents were highly involved, with 20 or more hours of activities a week.

Most children with activities did them fewer than 10 hours a week. Forty percent of children had no activities at all.