Summertime--the Livin’ Is Frantic for Today’s Kids : Families: Working parents don’t goof off from June to September, and neither do their children. Perhaps they should, say some child development experts.
“I don’t have to learn to swim,” the truculent 5-year-old declares in the locker room after a lesson with his coach.
“Yes, you do have to,” his impatient mother replies. “You want to go to Uncle Walter’s on the lake this summer, don’t you? And hurry up.”
“Why do we have to hurry?”
“Because you have to get to computer class.”
Parents everywhere can empathize with a mother expressing exasperation at the dawdling of a child. But in some cases, say child development experts, the youngster may deserve sympathy, too.
Once, the end of the school year meant the beginning of a seemingly endless season filled with free time--week after week of playing pick-up baseball, sleeping over with friends, camping out in the back yard, dodging household chores and generally goofing off.
Gone are those lazy, hazy days of summer.
Today, for millions of American children, summer has become much like the rest of the year: a nonstop round of tightly scheduled, highly organized activities--many of them designed not only to fill children’s waking hours, but also to develop or improve skills that can give kids a competitive edge in sports, academics, even social life.
“Children aren’t having the kinds of fun they once did because of all this over-programming,” says Dr. Edward Zigler, director of the Yale University Bush Center in Child Development. “The idea that kids could lie on their backsides and look at a passing cloud--we don’t let children do that anymore. We used to form our own neighborhood baseball teams and play on the local sandlot. Now you go to Little League. I worry about the pleasures of childhood, which seem to keep vanishing.”
Organized children’s summer activities have experienced a boom in recent years. An estimated 5.3 million children, for example, will attend camp programs for all or part of this summer, an increase of nearly 30% from the late 1970s, according to the American Camping Assn.
The same holds true for sports. Little League baseball, which has been around for more than half a century, has grown from 500,000 participants in the 1970s to more than 2 million today.
The changing nature of summer reflects the evolving needs of American families. With both parents often working outside the home, the proliferation of organized summer activities helps fill the gap occupied by schools during the rest of the year.
In addition, experts say, summer activities may lessen the guilt many parents feel over their inability to do more with their kids themselves. They also may assuage parental fears that their children will fall behind their peers if they spend too much time just hanging out.
Or it may just be that in the view of some parents, an opportunity not taken is an opportunity wasted.
“For me, overnight camp was an enormously important personal experience--living away from home, learning to get along with other kids in a small space,” says Nancy Chasen of Bethesda, Md. “But it wasn’t for skills development. The teaching wasn’t as good. I’ve wanted my kids to have a better experience.”
Chasen and her husband, Don Spero, are sending their kids, Laura, 11, and Ricky, 9, to wilderness survival camps for part of this summer. Their philosophy is that “camp is for skills you can only work on in the summer and can’t develop at home,” Chasen says. “So we rejected the artsy-craftsy camps in favor of wilderness.
“Our feeling is that if these opportunities are made available to children, they can choose as adults what they want to continue with. But if they are never exposed, it’s a whole piece of life they will never experience.”
Judy Sage of Urne, Wis., an occupational therapist who runs a sheep farm with her husband, is encouraging her two children this summer to leave the farm, where they would ordinarily spend most of their free time performing needed chores, to explore broader horizons.
The Sages cannot afford to send their children to specialty camps. But they are taking advantage of programs that are free, offer scholarships or receive partial subsidies.
Their 17-year-old daughter, Meg, who wants to become a veterinarian, will study part of the time in classes sponsored by the agriculture and life science college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She will also spend two weeks in Washington at a citizenship forum on the legislative process sponsored by 4-H.
Their 15-year-old son, Mark, will participate in an exchange program with a family in Montana. He plans to tour national historical sites and to visit such nearby places as Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park.
“I think such experiences help them develop their own identity, get them away from the family and give them a real break from having to do chores,” their mother says. “Normally, they work very hard. Their summers are not goof-off time at all. So this gives them a real break, with an educational component.”
But in all too many cases, experts say, the proclivity to over-program children during the summer months is attributable to overburdened parents who do not know how to relax themselves and do not understand the value of doing so. They tend to fill every minute for their children because they tend to fill every minute for themselves.
“The adults I know who have these kids--and are busy programming every part of their lives--don’t know how to play,” says Irene Goldenberg, a family psychologist and professor of bio-behavioral science at UCLA. “Our lifestyles don’t make it easy to have great big chunks of non-programmed time. Overburdened parents can’t take time to spend two weeks at the lake with their kids, or do casual stuff, pack a lunch and go to the beach.
“That time just isn’t available to adults,” she continues. “But that time is important in learning how to relax. There’s something reparative about just kicking back.”
Zigler, who refers to these highly scheduled kids as “gourmet children,” says parents undoubtedly “do this because they love their children and want the best for them.”
“So they send them to expensive, worthwhile places,” he says. “It’s a substitute for time they don’t spend with their children. But I don’t want to lay a guilt trip on parents. These are stressful times. It’s very hard, with both parents often working.”
Most child development experts say there is nothing wrong with these activities as long as they reflect the children’s desires and as long as the kids are having fun.
In such cases, most children find these experiences extremely rewarding. For many children, particularly those who are easily bored or distracted or have trouble managing their free time, the discipline involved in organized activities can be healthy.
The danger is that some parents are pushing their children to do something because the parents want it--and that forces children to cope with the combined pressures of trying to succeed and pleasing their parents, experts warn.
“The main problem is when the parents’ goals are being realized, not the kids’--when you go to soccer camp because you’re not quite good enough and your parents want you to get better, or you go to tennis camp because your sister went, or you go to a computer camp because your parents think you’re a genius,” Goldenberg says.
“Parents believe that the most important thing in raising kids is skill development: how well you play tennis, how well you do computers. It’s not,” she adds. “It’s not going to be the basis for satisfaction in life. What will be is how well you function with people.”
“If a kid has a real passion for what he or she is doing, (these programs) can be a real learning experience,” says Jerilyn Ross, a Washington psychotherapist. “But if the parents are doing it to make a child into something he or she is not, that is unhealthy.”
Specialty camps, which zero in on a particular skill, can be hugely enjoyable for children who already are proficient at something and want to get better, or who have a consuming interest they want to keep pursuing outside of school.
Such camps cater to every conceivable interest: theater, music, computers, sports, even space. NASA, for example, runs two programs, in Orlando, Fla., and Huntsville, Ala., that simulate the experience of being an astronaut.
In some cases, these activities can be eye-openers for youngsters who are exposed to something for the first time.
Carey Rivers, a camps consultant with Tips on Trips and Camps, which represents 500 summer programs, recalls one 15-year-old whose parents sent her to an arts camp in Italy, where she was introduced to sculpture for the first time.
“She wrote her parents: ‘How come you never told me about Bernini?’ ” Rivers says. “She fell madly in love with sculpture, majored in art history at Vassar and is now curator of sculpture at Christie’s. Many of these programs can really stimulate kids.”
But not all children can handle the pressure, experts say.
“A camp where you have to practice musical instruments all day, or play volleyball, can be very stressful,” says Yale University’s Zigler. “If you don’t achieve, you fail. Other camps that are based on exploration and good times, I prefer those.”
Many experts believe the key is balance. Observes Goldenberg: “Two weeks at space camp should be followed by two weeks of hanging out at the pool.”