01/18/04

Nancy Longman keeps her family's schedule on her PalmPilot, printing out a week's worth of activities at a time then posting it in the back hall. At a glance, her three children know if there's time for an after-school snack and a few minutes for homework or if they'll need to squeeze some homework in between soccer practice, gymnastics and ice hockey, which often doesn't end until 10:45 p.m.

Longman admits she can look at only a couple of weeks' schedules at a time because "seeing more than that is, I think, a little frightening."

Sitting in the sunroom of her Shaker Heights home, Longman reads from the copy of the family's Saturday schedule.

"Emily and I have to be at gymnastics by 8:15. John has flag football at the library from 10 to 11:30. So [my husband] Mike, will take John. Then Emily and I have to leave the gymnastics meet by 10ish because she has horseback riding and she's doing a make-up lesson at 11, then she has her regular lesson at noon."

"Christopher is 13 and he gets to play with the Shaker band on Saturday. Then when Emily and I come back from horseback riding, I have to go to the game because Mike is going to have to take John to Parma because he has a hockey game and he'll have to be there by 3."

After the hockey game, between 5 and 7, Longman says they'll have time, briefly, together as a family. "And then Christopher has hockey practice at 8 o'clock Saturday night."

"I can't forget about the goody bags for the gymnastics meet on Saturday," she says to herself, absentmindedly.

First thing Sunday morning, the Longmans are back in the car, taking eight-year old John to his travel soccer game at the Metroplex on South Miles in Warrensville. On Monday as he does each week, Mike is on the road, heading to his company's headquarters in Pittsburgh. He'll return to Cleveland Tuesday evening, leave again Wednesday morning and return home again, Friday-a night they try to maintain as "family night."

Longman, a former attorney, now a stay-at-home mom, says she's tired all the time. Christopher says he doesn't feel his life is too busy.

"I wouldn't keep this schedule if the kids didn't like it. I'm certainly not making them do it," she says.

"Emily and I have to be at gymnastics by 8:15. John has flag football at the library from 10 to 11:30. So [my husband] Mike, will take John. Then Emily and I have to leave the gymnastics meet by 10ish because she has horseback riding and she's doing a make-up lesson at 11, then she has her regular lesson at noon."

"Christopher is 13 and he gets to play with the Shaker band on Saturday. Then when Emily and I come back from horseback riding, I have to go to the game because Mike is going to have to take John to Parma because he has a hockey game and he'll have to be there by 3."

After the hockey game, between 5 and 7, Longman says they'll have time, briefly, together as a family. "And then Christopher has hockey practice at 8 o'clock Saturday night."

"I can't forget about the goody bags for the gymnastics meet on Saturday," she says to herself, absent-mindedly.

First thing Sunday morning, the Longmans are back in the car, taking eight-year old John to his travel soccer game at the Metroplex on South Miles Road in Warrensville.

On Monday, as he does each week, Mike

is traveling again, heading to his company's headquarters in Pittsburgh. He'll return to Cleveland Tuesday evening, leave again Wednesday morning and return home again, Friday - a night they try to maintain as "family

night."

Longman, a former attorney, now a stay-

at-home mom, says she's tired all the time.

Christopher says he doesn't feel his life is too busy. But his mother says, "I wouldn't keep this schedule if the kids didn't like it. I'm certainly not making them do it."

Sociologist Annette Lareau says the Longmans' hectic schedule is typical of today's middle-to-upper middle-class parents, who think their parenting duty consists of "concerted cultivation," something she defines as "fostering their children's talents and skills by enrolling them in organized activities and then heavily monitoring their experiences." Most middle-class parents can't conceive of not having their children in organized activities, says Lareau, author of Unequal Childhoods. Class, Race and Family Life, and they actually think they put adequate limits on how many activities their children participate in.

"If the hearth was the center of the home in the nineteenth century, the calendar is really the center of many middle-class families now," says Lareau, an associate professor in sociology at Temple University.

Most parents don't see their own family's schedules as "out of control," and will often compare themselves to other families, who they see as doing much more, with less control, she says. "You'll typically hear middle-class parents say, Oh we don't do what our friends do. They drive several hours to a competition for hockey. They're crazy.'"

"Being busy is the latest middle-class status symbol," says Cleveland psychologist Kathyrn Kozlowski. "When the moms' groups get together, they ask one another, So what's your little one doing?'

Oh, my child is in ice skating and gymnastics and she's on the academic spelling team and she just went to the finals for such and such.'" This super-sized schedule of children's activities for many parents also can be today's version of keeping up with the Joneses, she says.

Unlike Longman, Kozlowski says most parents aren't honest enough to admit how tired and worn out they are from trying to manage their children's schedules. "It makes them look like they're not cut out of the same fabric as everybody else. It makes them look weak."

Parental anxiety about a child's activity level starts early. Bulking up their children's after-school resumes with travel soccer teams, music, art and ballet classes is seen by many middle-and upper middle-class parents as absolutely necessary to give their kids an advantage in today's competitive college admission environment - and later the job market. Though most parents won't admit to having these motivations, Lareau says.

Before school started this year, Amy Weisberg-Whitehead of Shaker Heights admits she had to recheck her motivations and priorities. Her 14-year old daughter, Hannah, loves to play softball and has been on a team every year since she was nine years old. This past summer, when training for the girls high school softball team started before official tryouts, Hannah was there with everyone else, two afternoons a week, throwing the ball, running laps and lifting weights.

Already, Hannah had two after-school commitments: Religious school on Mondays and piano lessons on Tuesdays. When the softball coach "strongly recommended" her softball team participate in another training day - saying it was "optional" while adding it to the team's practice schedule - Hannah told her mom she wanted to quit.

"I didn't want to have something on my schedule every day," Hannah says, simply, telling her mom she wanted to leave time after school, at least once or twice a week, to paint or draw.

Weisberg-Whitehead says, "At first I thought, Of course you have to do this. You started it, you made a commitment.' But then I stopped myself. I found myself getting caught up in You have to be involved in this because it'll look good on your college application.'"

When Weisberg-Whitehead talks, she tilts her head and rests her hand on her chin. She speaks slowly, thoughtfully, often asking herself questions and then answering them in back-to-back sentences. She's clearly embarrassed sharing this revelation.

"I'm no different. I get caught up in it. How can you help it? We're surrounded by it," she says. "There's all these expectations at school, there's

all this pressure to put your kids into every conceivable extracurricular activity without realizing what they need to do is have time for their own pleasures.

"And why couldn't my daughter just come home and paint, if that's what she wants to do?

"Childhood has got to be about the journey and not the destination. How could I forget that?"

Parenting is now America's most competitive adult sport, according to child and adolescent psychiatrist, Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, author of The Overscheduled Child. Avoiding the Hyper-parenting Trap. Because of this competitiveness "doing childhood" has become a full-time job for kids.

"In the past 20 years, structured sports time has doubled, unstructured children's activities have declined by 50 percent, household conversations have become far less frequent, family dinners have declined 33 percent and family vacations have decreased by 28 percent," says Rosenfeld, by phone from his office in New York City, quoting studies done over the past several years.

"Our children are experiencing a childhood that is no longer just a preparation for adulthood but a full performance in its own right," says Rosenfeld. "We parents act as the producers; our children are pushed onto the stage and scored on every single thing they do. American parents have been persuaded that average is no longer good enough."

He says it's not hard to see how they got there, either.

Experts, like Rosenfeld, say the definition of "good parenting" began changing in the early Eighties when researchers reported that a lack of stimulation to a child's brain slightly impeded development. After that, marketers began flooding the market with developmental and educational toys such as high-contrast mobiles books, tapes and videos that made parents feel as though it was never too early to start stimulating a child's brain or begin a child's "formal education."

"We got into an idea that to be a good parent you need to provide and enrich every iota of possibility," Rosenfeld says. "What we forgot is that our homes were already pretty stimulating."

Barbara Carlson, co-founder of Putting Family First, a group of citizens in Wayzata, Minnesota, dedicated to prioritizing family life, says that in the past a "good parent" was someone who spent time with his or her children, teaching them values and manners, and worried about a child's character.

"Now, a good parent is someone who registers you for an activity, pays for it and then watches from the sidelines," says Carlson, who also co-authored a book with the same title as her organization.

Carlson points to the time, in the early Eighties, when more mothers began entering the full-time work force, and kids came home from school to empty houses and no supervision. Sociologists advised parents that structured activities would keep kids from experimenting with drugs and alcohol.

At the same time, child-snatchings began making front-page news, giving parents one more thing to worry about.

"When we were growing up, we didn't have to worry about being kidnapped." says 40-year old Longman, explaining another reason she likes her children to be in scheduled activities. "I always know where they are and who they're with, too."

As parents scrambled to keep their children busy and safe, programs offering after-school extracurricular activities, including lessons, clubs, organized off-season sports and tutors, grew.

The after-school activities created another problem: Children who happened to be home in the afternoons could no longer count on having someone down the street to hang out with, much less enough kids to put together a pick-up game of ball.

"If parents want their children to have a social life, they feel they have no choice but to be dragged into the same busy schedules as everyone else," Lareau says.

Meanwhile, parents' time together as a couple suffers. Longman claims that she and her husband "have no social life" as their kids' activities consume most Friday and Saturday evenings.

"Last week we had a fluke on a Saturday and we went to a movie in the middle of the day," she says, smiling. "Just the two of us. It was the first time in a long time, a really long time."

Jeff Hermann, of Hudson, believes the demands of his kids' sports' schedules makes finding a sense of balance impossible.

A few times a week, Jeff or his wife, Laura, drives their eldest son, Matt, 16, to the tennis club at 6 a.m. for an hourlong practice before school at Western Reserve Academy, where he is a sophomore.

Their twelve-year old daughter, Jane, plays on two travel soccer teams (in two different leagues), a travel basketball team and a recreation league basketball team. Her twin brother, Jake, participates in the same sports, in just as many leagues and on just as many teams. He'll start lacrosse practice in March.

Eleven-year old Mikey plays tennis, plays in two travel soccer leagues and participates on another soccer team in the recreational league. He also plays travel basketball and this month is playing lacrosse, as well as beginning practice with his travel baseball team.

With all the different sports their children are involved in, it is not uncommon for Jeff and Laura Hermann to watch two or more games Friday night, six games on Saturday and another six, Sunday. That is, unless one of their kids is participating in an "away" soccer tournament. The parent taking the child "catches a break" says Laura, because "you only have to watch one child play." After seeing an advertisement from an organization offering organized sports for children up to 6 years of age, she says she considered signing up Sam, 3, her youngest child, for soccer "because he spends so much time watching everyone else. And I think it'd be so cute to see him in a uniform."

Because of the kids' schedules, they can't attend church together most Sundays. Jeff, 41, remembers, sounding almost wistful, when sports had distinctive seasons that didn't last 10 months.

"When I was young, we didn't start playing in any organized way until seventh grade." says Jeff. "Now everything's so structured."

"Middle-class children get used to the idea that their parents are supposed to provide them with leisure activities," says sociologist Lareau. She found that these kids often lack initiative, have trouble managing their time and are unable to have fun in ways that aren't organized by adults.

Laura Hermann has seen this in her own children. "If they're not at a game or practice and they don't have a friend to play with, they're like, There's nothing to do, there's nothing to do," she says.

She feels immense peer pressure from other kids and parents to participate in everything "that has a sign up. You always have to be on the best team and once you get on it, you find out there's a better team and then you have to work to get on it."

Coaches are feeling the pressure, too. "I think what we're seeing now is that some parents think that the more their children practice, the better they're going to get," says Jeff Tipping, director of coaching education for the National High School Soccer Coaches Association of America. "More is not always better."

Hudson High School girls varsity soccer coach, Bob Dean, a father of two, says that last year he was criticized by a parent for not holding Saturday practices and scrimmages. "I told him I understood what he was trying to say to me, but asked, When do I get time with my own kids?'"

Tipping says pressure on coaches from parents and savvy entrepreneurs is making sports, especially soccer, more time intensive than they need to be.

"You can make an awful lot of money running these soccer tournaments and business people have learned that if they build it' the parents will come," he says, cautioning, "Letting kids play three games a day is idiotic. But a lot of parents don't have an educated sports background, so it's not their fault that they don't understand that sometimes keeping their child out of a tournament is a healthy policy."

Some teens express concern as well. Western Reserve Academy junior and varsity swimmer Brian Staudt, 16, says, "A lot of parents are so worried about their kids' success that they push them so hard to be on this exclusive team and do all these tournaments and do all this traveling for sport then eventually the kids don't have fun anymore and it just ruins the whole experience. It's almost like the parents are playing the sports and not the kids, with all the shouting the parents do from the sidelines and stuff."

Last winter, when Jeff Hermann tried to pull one of his children out of the indoor soccer session, he was told by the man running the indoor facility, "It's just not as easy as you telling me you don't want your kids to play anymore. There's economic issues involved - we've got a bunch of coaches to pay and rent, too," he recalls. "He told me he wasn't sure if there'd be room on the team if my child wanted to start up again in the spring."

Laura Hermann says she thinks it's unrealistic that a child would be able to make a varsity sports team, in a town like Hudson, if he or she didn't start playing competitive soccer before the age of nine.

Dean says that fear is unfounded. "My best soccer players are great athletes who are well-rounded-they're just as good in lacrosse as they are in soccer," he says.

Even so, Laura is afraid to suggest her kids cut back out of fear they'll be "left behind" everyone else.

"Left behind what?" Rosenfeld asks. "For every kid that makes it to the top of their sport, there are a thousand kids who made the sacrifices, practiced six hours a day, gave up friends and other interests, neglected the other aspects of their lives - and never made it to the top. Then what?"

If parents are pushing their kids hard in sports hoping to snag a college scholarship, Tipping says they should rethink it. National Athletic Association research shows barely 1 in 330 high school students will earn a college scholarship for athletics. When it comes to soccer scholarships, most still go to international students. And less than 3 percent of high school athletes will play any college sports at all, even briefly. The success rates may be slightly higher among elite-level youth programs, but not by much.

"Parents need to know that there are 30 times more dollars available for financial aid based on academics rather than athletics," says Tipping.

Jeff Hermann, who wrestled for Notre Dame College as a walk-on, says his kids' participation in athletics isn't tied to hopes for a scholarship. He just wants his kids to sample everything.

Laura Hermann estimates they spend between $10,000 and $15,000 a year to fund their four older children's activities. She insists her kids are involved in so many activities "because they love it."

But Dr. Francoise Adan, a psychiatrist in private practice in Beachwood, thinks using the "my kids love it" reasoning for allowing sports to dictate family life, is not a good idea. Saying "no" to schedule overload is no different from monitoring your child's diet, she says.

"Most mom's wouldn't think of letting their kids drink more than one Coke a day because it's not good for them. Putting constraints on the number of activities they do, the number of nights they're away from home, is the same thing. They might love it. But it's not good for them."

Laura finds saying "no" or cutting back on her children's activities hard because "the schedule has become such a big part of my life. Their games are my social life on Saturdays and Sundays," she confesses. "I'm afraid I'd almost be bored if I didn't have these things to do on weekends."

Today's frenetic lifestyle is also taking its toll on today's youth.

According to studies by groups such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the nonprofit, New York-based American Institute of Stress, children as young as nine are now experiencing anxiety attacks; and from 1980 to 1997 the number of 10- to 14-year-olds who committed suicide increased 109 percent.

With the hectic schedules our children are keeping, children risk becoming what adolescent psychologist Mark McConville, of Cleveland terms, "dazed survivors of middle-class boot camp."

"I see a lot of kids who push themselves really hard. And when they hit eleventh, twelfth, grade they end up getting depressed because their notion of life is that it's just about work and nose to the grindstone and there's no sense of how you step back and reflect," he says.

Harvard University recently published a report stating that students were already burned out when they arrived on campus.

"The diligent, high-achieving children are most at risk and, unfortunately, they're the ones who are burning out and they're also the kids who have the most to contribute," McConville says, adding that many of these kids are motivated more by the fear of failure than anything else.

Seventeen-year-old, Nadine Abraham of Kent, a senior at Western Reserve Academy is up every morning by 6. Her school schedule is full with six classes, five of which are Advanced Placement (AP): English, calculus, statistics, economics, French 5, and a senior seminar. After school she practices with the varsity tennis team for several hours before heading back to school to work on the school's newspaper (she's co-editor), or for a Leadership Council meeting, to edit the school's literary magazine, Buffo, or to give a tour of the school to prospective students. Her homework keeps her up past midnight. She admits she is "very afraid of failure.

"There's a part of me that's saying that it's not really important what the end result is - that it's more important how you get there and how hard you work. But then society places so much value on Did you make the grade? Did you do well?'" she says. And though she makes straight A's, Nadine says she feels guilty and anxious whenever she decides to intentionally put off doing her homework to spend time with friends, write in her journal or just lie on her bed, doing nothing.

Whenever Western Reserve Academy senior, Marianne Eppig, 18, of Shaker Heights, tries to relax, she says, "I have this big bad monster in my head that says, Marianne, you should be doing something more important. You should be working right now.'"

Yet Adan insists it's important to make time to be alone in our heads. That's when things happen we can't live without: Contemplation, reflection and focus.

"Kids are overscheduled because the adults in their lives are overscheduled," McConville says. Somewhere along the line, most of us bought into productivity as a chief value in life. The lie that came along with this value was that the more we worked the greater the productivity. The end result: Rest is dangerous to productivity. We can rest only after the work is done, he says.

"Our children are measured by what they do, rather than who they are," Rosenfeld says. "Parents need to ask which they prefer - that their kid is an honor student or the star of the baseball team or that he is somebody that is really kind to everybody else."

Parents' daily actions broadcast to their children what their philosophy of life is. "Intelligent children watch what their parents do and come to their own conclusions. If all you do is work constantly and expect everyone else to do the same, your children may conclude that you do not consider joy integral to a good life," McConville says. He says it is up to parents to teach driven, self-motivated kids, like Eppig and Abraham, how to relax, even if it means forcing them to have downtime.

Schedule overload interferes with rituals such as family gatherings and weekend outings, says McConville. It comes at the expense of time together, just hanging out as a family.

Teens are feeling the loss, too. A national YMCA poll in 2000 found 21 percent of teens rate a lack of time with their parents as their top concern, tied with educational worries.

"What children need is parents who will hang out with them, with no goal in mind beyond the pleasure of spending time together," Rosenfeld says. "The greatest gift we can give them is the deep, inner conviction that they don't have to perform for us to love and cherish them."

Rosenfeld says parents need to become more reflective about what they think a good kid is, as well as defining what they think a good family life is and what they think being a good parent is.

"How do you really define success?" he asks.

Nadine Abraham and Marianne Eppig, along with classmates Brian Staudt and senior Ryan Williams, all say they define "success" as getting married, having a family and then being able to spend time with that family.

"To be successful, you can't think about a career," says 17-year-old Williams, of Cleveland. "You have to think about family. Where am I going to live? It's life and life isn't having a career and having a lot of money and fancy cars and stuff like that." Yet Williams admits he's taking advanced placement economics and Latin "because colleges like to see people in the classics."

"When we begin to realize that these material objects don't fill the hunger of our soul and the only thing that fills it is if parents, or somebody who really loves you, looks you in the eyes and says, I love you' and you believe it," says Rosenfeld. "That's what all human beings, all teenagers in my practice, are looking for."

Some frazzled parents are fighting back.

After repeatedly hearing stories of athletes being benched for missing a game due to a family wedding, their grandparent's funeral or a church retreat, Barbara Carlson helped to launch Putting Family First. She says the group is intended for two kinds of families: Those who want to reprioritize family life and those who want support to maintain their current priority on family time.

"We feel the absolute foundation for building healthy, well-adjusted kids is close family relationships. But if the family's never together, it's really hard to build that foundation," says the mother of four grown children.

Initially she thought coaches and school administrators wouldn't support the effort. But they also were concerned - they have families, too," she says.

Carlson says the organization is simply trying to encourage parents to take a stand and not be afraid their kids are going to miss out on something by stepping back and making family time a priority. In the five years since its founding, the group's mission has received the blessing of the area's faith community, school administrators, PTA, sports organizations and area businesses.

"For change to take place, it has to be large numbers of parents saying, This is crazy. This has gotten out of hand and we're not going to do this anymore,'" says Carlson. "Parents used to be afraid to say it out loud, fearing they were the only ones feeling this way and that if they did something about it, their kids would be penalized. There's strength in numbers."

In Ridgewood, New Jersey, Marcia Marra, a mother of three girls and part-time employee of the local family counseling agency, felt overwhelmed by her family's hectic schedule. Using Rosenfeld's book and the Putting Family First model as inspiration, Marra organized a meeting of parents, clergy, school administrators, coaches and community leaders, to ask if they, too, felt their lives were "out of control."

The answer: A resounding, "Yes." After that initial meeting, Marra was joined by others interested in doing something about it, giving birth to the citywide initiative called, "Ready, Set, Relax." Working closely with school administrators and coaches, the first "Ready, Set, Relax" event kicked off on March 26, 2002. That night, throughout the city, school teachers assigned no homework, there were no scheduled sports practices, no dance or music lessons and no church youth groups met. Instead, families were encouraged to eat a relaxed dinner together and just hang out and play board games "or do whatever else they wanted to do," says Marra. It is now an annual event.

The event has spurred other changes. Coaches spoke up about their concern that youth sports programs were starting when the kids were too young. They said the pressure wasn't building a "love of sports," but instead making kids drop out and never try again.

"High school coaches told me they had kids coming into the ninth grade saying, I'm no good at soccer or swimming or whatever.' And it usually went back to a first- or second-grade experience when they didn't get picked or when they were put on the lowest team," Marra says. They decided to offer an alternative for kids.

Coaches and physical education teachers now make gym space available for elementary kids to come and play. There's also talk about forming alternative, noncompetitive leagues for elementary-aged kids that encourage athleticism and fun, not winning. According to Marra, the superintendent of schools is working with teachers to address "the homework overload issue."

She's not fazed by the irony of having to work so hard to help other families realize there's value in scheduling unscheduled family time. She says if we aren't intentional about it, it's not going to happen.

"If we don't make a conscious effort to say, We want to go apple picking this fall, let's put it on the calendar,' before we know it, it's December and we've missed it," she says.

Laura Hermann says she, for one, would welcome one night to jump off the treadmill if "everyone else in the community was doing it, too. That way, my kids wouldn't be singled out as the only ones with parents who'd had it." She thinks it should happen more than once a year. In the meantime, she and her husband, Jeff, trying to cut back somewhere, have decided to allow their children to play only on teams that have the word "Hudson" in it.

There's no easy solution to this frenetic pace, Marra says. But if parents can examine their children's lives and simplify things, it will help.

The communities of Palo Alto, California, and Farmingdale, Michigan, have followed suit and established their own "Ready, Set, Relax" events.

"This one night is just a start," says Marra.

As a mother of four boys involved-in-every-sport-that-requires-a-ball-to-participate, Diana Keough researched and wrote this article so that when she wants to take a nap on Saturday afternoon instead of going to watch yet another soccer game or tennis match, she won't feel so guilty.

For more information on programs promoting family time, visit the Ready, Set, Relax! site at www.readysetrelax.org or Putting Family First at www.puttingfamilyfirst.info.