Hide and Seek on Saturday Is Out, but Pencil In Sunday for Tag

In our passion to perfect and protect our children, are we damaging something inside them?

As a middle-class parent with obsessive tendencies, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to sign up your children for classes that will develop their nascent -- or so far totally hidden -- talents. It’s hard not to get on the frantic circuit where you throw bagels into the back seat of the van as you ferry them to soccer, ballet, music, art, martial arts, swimming and computer classes.

Then there’s the push to spring-load their academic skills, so you take the baby to sign language lessons or the 4-year-old to a reading tutor (at $75 an hour). You’re doing it because normal neurological development can be so pokey, and you’ve read somewhere that these classes can permanently enhance hand-eye (or foot-eye) coordination and IQ scores.

If you don’t do it, what else are you going to do? As your children get a little older, all their friends are signed up for classes and practices, so there is no one left to play with.

Anyway, playing doesn’t arise spontaneously from classmates walking home from school and deciding to gather in someone’s backyard. “Play dates” are put together by parents with the kind of advance notice and attention to appropriate pairings usually reserved for arranged marriages.

But you have no choice: It’s too dangerous to let anyone younger than a teenager out of your sight, what with bagel-throwing mothers roaring around the streets and every stranger a potential pederast.

Pounding at you is the uneasy notion that unless you manage it right, childhood is a series of lost opportunities. If you wait too long, someone else’s daughter will end up being the oboe-playing, multilingual figure skater who gets into the right college.

But perhaps in all our efforts to do it right, we are doing something deeply wrong. By becoming managers of our children, by having most of their waking hours mediated by adult instructors, we are robbing them of some essential purposes of childhood.

Toni Bickart of Teaching Strategies, a Washington, D.C., publisher of early childhood curricula, says she has seen a dramatic change in these kids over the last 10 years. Because they spend so little time on the playground interacting with other children, they simply don’t understand concepts like taking turns. To compensate, teachers are asking Bickart for lesson plans on how to make friends and use imagination.

The trend toward structuring young children’s lives was documented in a 1998 University of Michigan study that looked at how children ages 3 to 11 spent their time and compared it with a similar 1981 survey. The later study showed that participation in organized sports increased more than 50%. Not surprisingly, free time dropped to 25% of the children’s day, from 40% in 1981. And a recent Washington Post article described how recess, the once guaranteed block of barely contained anarchy in a child’s day, has been disappearing, replaced by organized gym time or more hours in the classroom.

In pushing out free play, we risk not just damaging social and imaginative skills but also doing harm to the cognitive skills we are hoping to boost. New York University psychologist Jerome Bruner talks about the possible long-term damage done to psyche and intellect by forcing young brains to master tasks they are not ready for.

He compares the teaching of reading and writing in Hungary and Britain. The Hungarians wait until their children are 7, and by age 12 they rank near the top of European literacy assessments. The British, on the other hand, have pushed down reading instruction to 4; their literacy rankings have dropped concomitantly. Let this be a warning for us against ever-earlier academics and standardized testing.

Of course, I have not been immune to the pressure. When my daughter was 5, I signed her up for tap-dancing lessons. At the last class, I saw the effort on her face as she mastered an astoundingly tricky routine. When I praised her, she said, “I didn’t want to make my teacher sad. But I don’t want to go back.”

She didn’t.

Then last year, when she was 6, I felt I should sign her up for a soccer league. She says she likes it fine. But the other day, we had four of her friends over. The girls found a basket of balls and ran around the house in a homemade game of dodge ball. That game took coordination and teamwork, the benefits ascribed to playing soccer.

It also caused the kind of exultant laughter I have never heard on the soccer field.