One of my favorite memories with my own three kids (now ages 20, 18 and 14) happened when the D.C. area was blanketed by a heavy snow. We couldn’t drive and they had no homework, so we all went outside and played with the other neighborhood kids who emerged, almost miraculously, from their screens and itineraries. Together we created a luge course on our hilly cul-de-sac and spent several hours sliding down and trudging back up to do it all over again. I couldn’t have scheduled that magic had I tried.
Such serendipitous bursts of unscripted play might be essential for kids to find happiness, suggests Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who blogs on Psychology Today’s website. Gray correlates rising levels of anxiety and depression in young adults (five to eight times more common than half a century ago) with the lack of free play in their lives.
“We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression and various other mental disorders,” Gray says.
There’s just one problem: We as parents may be modeling some of the very behaviors that our kids are now advised to avoid—including overscheduling ourselves to the point of exhaustion. (It’s tempting to invoke our own parents’ oft-repeated mantra, Do as I say and not as I do.)
It doesn’t help that we live in a culture that fosters extreme parenting. Among high school parents, it’s practically a competitive sport to talk about how late your kids were up studying, or how many hours of homework they have, or how many activities they are juggling to create an impressive college application.
“We understand the cutthroat business of what it is to manufacture a résumé for a kid so they can get into college,” admits Brown, whose oldest heads to college this fall. “[But I fear that] we’ve done them such a disservice with all this worrying and micromanaging and scheduling…that they are not even going to know what happiness is if it hits them on the head…I’m kind of scared to get the answer to that.”
Parents are under pressure, too. Many feel they are judged by their peers on the number of hours they put into coaching, orchestrating extracurricular clubs and attending school functions. It’s not easy to earn that parenting badge.
“Even President Obama tries to go to his kids’ games,” remarks Kellie Meiman Hock (wife of Jim Hock), 44, a managing partner with an international strategic advisory firm in D.C. “That’s what you do. It’s noticed if you’re not at your kids’ games. It’s noticed by your kids and by the other people, too.”
For logistical and emotional support, the Hocks recently recruited Kellie’s mom and stepdad, Pat and Gary O’Connor (who are retired) to move up from Atlanta and help with co-parenting.
But not all families have that luxury. “I’m amazed at how stressful it is for parents,” says Sushmita Mazumdar, 44, a local artist and educator who grew up in India—where she says parents are less involved in their kids’ schools—and now lives near Gunston Middle School, where her son started last year. “Other parents are always asking if you’ve signed up for this and saying if you don’t sign up for that, he’s going to lose out in high school.”
The irony, of course, is that parents who are stretched too thin run the risk of shortchanging the ones they love most, including their kids.
“Even when I’m home and I’m present, I’m distracted,” says McLean mom Carole Roan Gresenz (the Georgetown professor), who admits to sitting in her car with a laptop during soccer practices and checking email in the evenings. “A generation ago, weekends and nights were solely the domain of focusing on kids.” Not anymore.
“When I’m not on a trip and I don’t have an evening event, I’m able to leave the office by 5 or 5:30, precisely because I keep working…,” says Kellie Meiman Hock, who frequently works side-by-side with her boys while they do their homework.
Things weren’t like that for Meiman Hock as a child, even though her mom worked. “When I was working, I would go home and be finished with working,” says her mom, Pat O’Connor, 67, a former manager at Ma Bell. “I didn’t have the constant pressure of email.”
Now, even the hallowed tradition of the family dinner is falling by the wayside.
When I was young, we were seated at the dinner table every night at 5:30 p.m., even on the nights that my dad, an internist, had to go back to work. Today, my own family is lucky to eat three meals together a week.
“We’re in a cycle where this is kind of the norm for a child to be involved in several extracurricular activities and for most of the quality time to be spent on the road,” says Carpenter, the Ballston psychotherapist.
Meanwhile, research on the importance of the family dinner continues to pile up. Teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week are nearly four times more likely to use tobacco, more than twice as likely to use alcohol, and 2.5 times likelier to use marijuana, according to a 2012 report from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
Other studies have shown that children eat healthier foods when they eat a family dinner.
So which choice is the right one? Treat the dinner hour as sacred, or support the kids in pursuing interests they love that will make them more impressive college applicants? Either way, there are sacrifices involved.