AVOID OVERSCHEDULING YOUR CHILDREN
Don't schedule too many activities for your children. Although your intentions might be to provide your children with a wonderful childhood, you may be harming them in the process.
So says Dr. Todd C. Reiher, a licensed psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Wartburg College in Waverly, IA.
"Parents should be giving their children more time, not more activities," advises Reiher.
In addition to regular family activities, parents often immerse their children in a regimen of excessive organized and scheduled recreation and education. It's not unusual for parents to fill their children's schedules with obligations like swimming lessons, tennis lessons, sport's camps and practices, in addition to church and family activities.
"You may be doing a disservice to them in the name of 'good' parenting," says Reiher.
In addition to creating a hectic family schedule, the danger is that when the activities stop, the youngsters feel a sense of emptiness, boredom, and a lack of comfort with themselves or their families.
Those children won't have had the luxury of time to think, to read, to wonder, to imagine, to create, to explore their developing inner selves, says Reiher. And too many activities may produce children who look from season to season, activity to activity.
"We are raising a generation of kids who don't know how to kick back, relax, and be with themselves. They maintain schedules that many working people would find demanding."
It seems likely that parents engage in this practice because it helps them to feel secure in their roles as parents, says Reiher. Many households have parents who both work outside the home. Many find this lifestyle leaves them with very little time. They do more FOR their kids rather than doing more WITH their kids. Thus the logic becomes, "even if I can't spend as much time with my child as I think I should, I can provide a wealth of activities and a wonderful childhood."
This might also be a symptom of growing "affluenza," the disease of an affluent society, says Reiher. "There is too much noise. There are too many things. The same philosophy that leads Americans to spend more than they can afford, to eat more than they need to, and to try to do more than they have time for is being applied to children as well."
###
Editors: You can reach Reiher at 319-352-8354 (office). Please contact Steve Infanti of Dick Jones Communications at 814-867-1963 or [email protected] if you need any assistance.
RSS