Dance, soccer, piano, swim, repeat: We’re not helping our kids by keeping them busy | Canada Voices

“Mama, is this a handstand?” my four-year-old asked for approximately the 37th time that morning, wedging herself upside-down between the wall and the sofa. She had been parkouring around the living room for days, with a sudden enthusiasm for acrobatics I hadn’t seen before. It sure was not a handstand, but I had no idea how to teach her to do one.

Maybe it was the lack of coffee or daylight-savings sleep deprivation, but I Googled gymnastics lessons and enrolled her – and her younger sister – in weekly sessions, $900 poorer.

Now that the days are suddenly colder and darker, a trip to the park after school is largely out of the question, but our kids are still brimming with energy and we still have five hours to kill before bedtime. So we often scamper to sign kids up for all the things – but does that really serve them, or just keep them busy?

It turns out experts have been warning parents about this for decades: Kids that have packed schedules of, say, dance and piano and swim and soccer are not happier or more advanced. In fact, psychologists have been trying to tell us over and over again that overscheduled children are more anxious, depressed and angry. So why are we still doing this in 2024?

“It is this overwhelming mentality of ‘this doesn’t feel right, but everyone else is doing it,’” says Dr. Shimi Kang, psychiatrist and UBC associate professor. Dr. Kang has made a career out of teaching parents how to raise creative, self-motivated adaptable kids with her book The Dolphin Parent (which she contrasts with the permissive Jellyfish Parent and the authoritarian Tiger Parent). Extracurricular activities, she says, are not the answer.

“When you really sit with parents and talk to them, they tell you it doesn’t feel right to drag their kid out of bed, drive across the city, have dinner in their car. There’s no time for anything else, but they do it because they feel they’re supposed to.”

Dr. Kang encourages parents to make a schedule where there are non-negotiables slotted in – 12 hours of sleep, seven hours of school, family dinners together – before deciding how many activities are too many.

“One of the most robust findings in all of child development,” she adds, “is that if you have dinner together as a family, you have better social health, mental health, academic performance.”

For the time remaining, she suggests choosing activities that your child shows interest in – but not all extracurriculars are created equal. “You want to pick activities that promote play, not instruction … and ones that are social over ones that are solitary.”

With the new addition of Friday gymnastics classes, my young girls, who were also signed up for ballet and swimming on Saturday, were suddenly doing three activities in a 24-hour span. Saying it out loud to Dr. Kang, I realize it sounds insane.

“You just need to question whether it’s working really well in your family,” says Dr. Kang, “if it’s bringing joy.”

For Kristen Bachner, a mom of two in Toronto, she knew something had to give – because her five-year-old told her it did.

“She came to us and said ‘I can’t do ballet on Fridays any more.’ She said she doesn’t want to be rushed at the end of her week,” she explains. With a jam-packed schedule – Girl Guides on Wednesday, soccer on Thursday, ballet on Friday, jazz on Saturday and swimming on Sunday – her little girl was exhausted. I am too, just hearing about it.

“I struggle because I was over-scheduled as a child,” Ms. Bachner says. As a competitive softball player, Bachner was practising – even in the winter – five times a week, at six years old. Her husband was a competitive swimmer who spent mornings and evenings at the pool, six days a week, also at age six. “We’re such grinders and relaxing at home just isn’t in our DNA.”

Overscheduling was a popular trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In The Overscheduled Child, published in 2000, the authors, Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, wrote that the current generation of parents were more informed than any previous ones. According to the book, the advent of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle fed into an anxiety-ridden parenting style of “the earnest effort to get it just right,” but, counterintuitively, trying too hard was taking away from valuable family time. As one Wall Street Journal cover story put it at the start of the new millennium, a kids’ level of busyness had “became a status symbol” for parents.

“For some children, it’s an after-school pressure cooker,” declared a New York Times headline in 1999.

Dr. Georgia Witkin, then the director of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Stress Program, was quoted in the alarm-raising piece: “parents feel that if their kids don’t do it all, they’re not doing enough.”

It’s now 26 years later, and parents have still seemingly not learned this lesson.

Bachner says she felt that “if we aren’t constantly going, going, going, if we’re just relaxing at home, I feel we’re not making the best use of our time and our kids aren’t learning important skills … which I am starting to learn is a little bit toxic.”

Like a lot of moms, she says the “comparison game” with other people’s kids, intensified by social media, was hard to resist. The pressure came from all angles, but mostly from an intense concern that if her kids didn’t start these activities at an early age, they would be behind for life. That’s something Dr. Kang says is a story for the ages, and something she commonly hears from her clients – but that it is not rooted in evidence.

She suggests parents look to Finland, where extracurricular activities are not encouraged at a young age – only free-range, outdoor play. Finnish kids excel at math, science and reading comprehension in teenage years. And in other metrics, too – such as the number of Nobel Prize winners and the country’s mental wellbeing. The Finnish are thriving, Dr. Kang says, despite, or maybe because of, the no-pressure attitude. “They’re not indoors and they’re not in any scheduled activities. For all of human history, young kids have been free playing outside.”

I hear her voice echoing in my head as I’m rushing my four- and two-year-old to gymnastics at twilight, after school on a Friday. Both kids were already screaming in the backseat, asking for snacks and fighting to get a word in. I took a deep breath and turned the car around. My kids got bundled up, and we stepped into the chilly, barely lit backyard. The three of us attempted to do our very poor handstands against our big birch tree, trying to hold up each other’s feet – and failing, falling, and laughing together for hours.