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Dad has to eat his words about parenting ... again
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Published: January 29, 2009
It's been a while since I last sampled the tender flesh of crow, but, boy, the flavor never improves.
The source of my most recent humbling is a pledge made several years ago that I would never hyper-parent my children.
Hyper-parenting, you may recall, is the term coined years ago by a psychiatrist describing parents who over-schedule their children in an attempt to enrich their lives. They drag them from one activity to another, always keeping something on the schedule.
As it turns out, experts say this is bad for both the children and their parents. I frequently belittled those parents and felt quite superior in my parenting skills. I hesitate to go so far as to call myself supercilious, but I was knocking at its door.
My children always would have ample free time to create their own activities, I thought. So far, I've been successful. The future looks grim, though, and this dissonance between what I want to do and what may happen is exceptionally frustrating.
Now that activity creep is drawing nigh, I've found I have much more sympathy for those other parents. Obviously, there are boneheaded parents everywhere, but I realize that most other parents likely started the same way I did. Let the children pick a few activities each year until they find one or two they like, then stay with those.
But there are so many things to try! Too many choices are just as bad as too few, but I didn't think this would apply to my children's pastimes. If we only let them try a couple of things each year, they'd be 30 years old before settling on anything. And they have a hard time choosing what they want.
So far, our oldest is involved in choir, Girl Scouts, swimming and soccer, not to mention the requisite school projects and homework. She's not enrolled in them all at once, but even so, during the school year she's participating in four of the five at any given time.
Now our youngest wants to start adding to the activity burden. Of course, she wants to do different things. So we have the potential to have two kids involved in seven scheduled activities without even lifting the proverbial finger. Not to mention the things my wife and I would like them to try that we've been unable to fit in yet. And we still want them to have "down time."
I know. I'm the parent, so I could choose for them, but what if I pick wrong? Claire wants to be an Olympic swimmer, so what happens if we commit her to year-round swimming for three or four years and then she changes her mind? She'd have missed out on a lot of other opportunities over those years.
I'm confident we'll be able to find some balance. And while I'll still look askance at the bustle some parents force on their kids, I'm becoming much more sympathetic to the scheduling pains many of us go through.
But I still hate the taste of crow.
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