Are non-stop activities enriching or exhausting?

We all want our kids to have as many opportunities and great experiences as possible. But does any of this sound familiar? Your children spend much of their time talking to the back of your head as you race them from one extra-curricular activity to the next. At least three times a week, your family scarfs down dinner in the back seat between hockey practice and violin lessons. You can’t honestly remember the last time your family had absolutely nowhere to be at any given hour.

Welcome to modern parenting, where kids’ schedules have spiraled out of control.

Lisa Karlovsky’s weekdays begin at 5:30 AM. Karlovsky has three kids in three different schools. Karlovsky’s three-year-old daughter is enrolled in dance class, gymnastics and swimming. Her sons, eight and 11, have after-school activities four days a week, as well as Hebrew school and tutoring.

“By the time we come home at 6:00 pm, I fix dinner or do take-out to save time and then sit down with both boys to tackle three hours of homework while I have a babysitter caring for my daughter,” says Karlovsky. “Then it’s baths and off to bed. Then my night chores begin, and maybe by midnight I can call it a day.”

Rachel Chou’s daily grind is even busier. She has two girls, aged four and seven. The four-year-old takes ballet and gymnastics after pre-school. “My seven-year-old is quite overscheduled,” she admits, with piano lessons on Mondays, ballet and 90 minutes of gymnastics twice a week, and art class on Fridays.

“Somewhere in there, she needs to find time to practice piano every day. She’d like to start guitar lessons, but I’m not sure when we’d do it,” says Chou.

Transportation to and from activities became so hectic that Chou hired a nanny to do most of it while she was at work. Chou’s children do get tired, but she believes it’s good for them to be so active. “I’d feel far more worried if they weren’t doing anything,” she says. “The activities don’t seem to add stress at all.”

Simplify your family’s life
Many parents feel that their children’s lives are more enriched by activities than by time with their parents, says pediatrician Meg Meeker, MD, author of The Ten Habits of Happy Mothers: Reclaiming our Passion, Purpose, and Sanity.

“We believe that the best that we can do for our kids is to sign them up for many extra-curricular activities, but the truth is, that’s not what’s healthy for a kid. Strong character development, and a sense of strong emotional footing in a child’s life comes from face-to-face time with Mom and Dad, not from activities,” says Dr. Meeker, a mother of four. “The love-based, need-based connection that we have with our children is never reproduced in any of their activities. I know this because I made the same mistake when my kids were young.”

One evening, with four hungry, cranky kids piled into her mini-van en route to a birthday party, Dr. Meeker experienced her ‘a-ha’ moment.

“I pulled over to the side of the road and said ‘OK, I’ve had it. We’re going home.’ I realized that I wasn’t spending enough time with my kids. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re missing until we’re forced to turn a corner and move in a completely different direction.”

Dr. Meeker’s family then adopted what she calls the ‘One Rule’. “Each child chooses one after-school activity per semester. That’s it. And I did the same with myself. There’s this sense that good parenting is all about offering a wide variety of opportunities to our kids, but there’s no end to those opportunities: if we give them two, why not three? We have to draw the line somewhere because what our kids need is more of us, not more opportunities. The only way we can do that is to simplify our lives.”

In her 25 years as a pediatrician, Dr. Meeker has listened to thousands of exhausted mothers. “There’s a tremendous amount of peer pressure that moms feel to make sure that our kids keep up,” says Dr. Meeker. “If we stay home to do crafts, we feel like bad parents.”

The easiest way to tell if your child is overbooked is to take the emotional temperature in the home, explains Dr. Meeker. “Are kids tired? Are they jumpy and barking at each other? Start with your instincts. What is that little voice in your head telling you?”

We Moms get into a vicious cycle: The busier I keep my children, the better mom I am because all the other mothers are doing it. But it never works, says Dr. Meeker.

“Exhausted, irritable mothers have exhausted, irritable children. Down deep, we’re never satisfied with the parenting we’re doing, because we’ve all come up empty at the end of the day.”

Women need to retrain the way we think, says Dr. Meeker. “Say, ‘I’m providing a happier childhood for my kids because they’re living slower and because we’re home together more’. That’s when we begin to see what good parenting is all about, but in order for moms to get there, we really have to avoid that tie-in to the belief that better parenting is more active kids.”

Wendy Helfenbaum is a freelance writer and television producer whose six-year-old son plays hockey twice a week. That’s it.