Organizing Childhood to Death

A few days ago, another parent on my neighborhood’s parent email group asked if anyone were interested in soccer for the tots. Well, I thought, soccer is fun… I played in college… DD likes to kick the ball… She likes running… But organized soccer for a two-year-old? I don’t know…

I spent five years coaching, first t-ball for a year then instructional league baseball (that is, with a pitching machine) for four. I loved it. The kids loved it. Most of the parents loved it. (A few didn’t like ME because I taught the kids to play, patted them on the back, told them to have fun, and TOTALLY IGNORED THE SCORE. My little teams usually did well, which was fun, but totally not the point. Topic for another blog.) So, there is absolutely a place for organized sports in some children’s lives.

But the children I coached ranged in age from five to seven, and it seems there are so many organized activities nowadays for much younger kids as well as older ones. (For my concerns about too much structure too soon, see my earlier entry about preschool.) There’s soccer, t-ball, peewee football, cheering, music class, dance class, art class, Zoo class, swim team, yoga class, story-time at the library … not to mention playdates and preschool (then school).

Which got me thinking, it seems that today’s parents are spending a lot of time scheduling activities for their very young children. When do these kids just get to play? Are we organizing childhood to death?

It’s such a change from my own childhood that it gives me pause. I have absolutely no recollection of doing anything remotely organized by my parents or other adults. No playdates. No team sports (not until college for me, anyway). No classes.

I had a great childhood. I grew up in a relatively rural area just outside a small town in middle Georgia. Until I went to school, I went to daycare during the school year (my mom was a teacher). Once school started, I did the standard in-school stuff – 4-H, for example – and took piano lessons. In the summers, both before and after I started school, I pretty much ran amok (until I was old enough for a summer job). My mother’s idea of scheduling my summer activities was to give me a list of chores to complete during the week and to tell me each day: “Go outside and don’t come back in until I call you unless you have to go to the bathroom!”

There weren’t any sidewalks. The road wasn’t even paved for many years. Two other children lived on my road: Rachael, a year younger than me, and her sister Claire, a year older than my younger middle sister. We rode our bikes. We pretended my family’s swing was a train and traveled around the world. We played with Barbies. We read. Yes, following my list of activities above, we even played ball, cheered, danced, did art, played with our pets, swam at a neighbor’s pool, and went to the library. (I admit that soccer was not something I encountered until college, and yoga? Not an activity encountered by a middle-Georgia child with a middle class, fairly blue-collar upbringing!!)

It was, in two words, pretty ideal. In fact, it bordered on idyllic!

So why don’t we parents today let our kids have this freedom, this apparent luxury of an unscheduled childhood? Why do we feel the need to schedule our children’s play?

There are several reasons for this phenomenon, I think.

First, fear is a big motivator for parents. I’ve not seen any statistics. I don’t know if there are more child abductions or more child predators out there now than there were in the 70s. It does seem to me, though, that we hear an awful lot more about them. Part of this increase in information is good – AMBER alerts make sure that people know about an abduction and are in a better position to prevent harm to a child; sex offender registries alert parents to the need for appropriate vigilance. On the other hand, in the era of 24-hour news, play-by-play coverage of “high profile” kidnappings and by-the-minute details about John Mark Carr’s whereabouts may be a bit much. Do parents in Atlanta need to hear about the kidnapping of a child in California? Maybe. Maybe not.

Regardless of whether we need to know, we do, and it makes us wary of leaving our toddlers and children to play alone in their own yards, much less in the wider area of their neighborhoods or local parks. My husband, who grew up in suburban Dallas and then Atlanta, remembers riding his bike and running around the neighborhood with his friends in a way that kids today don’t. And I think they don’t because we parents worry. A lot. In light of that, scheduled playdates, supervised classes, and organized sports look pretty attractive.

Second, for us urban parents there is some lack of “run around” space that is appropriate for unsupervised fun. My family had twelve acres, six of which was “yard.” My friend next door had a similar amount of yard in which we could stage our adventures. Since we were on a road that was pretty much untraveled except by those 10 or so families that lived on it – and there were only three houses past ours – our parents didn’t worry too much about us getting hit by traffic either, so we could ride our bikes in the road once we were “old enough.”

We feel uncomfortable letting our DD play in the front yard without us very close by. There’s no fence (hopefully coming). Lots of cars drive by, many at unreasonable speeds. We have lovely parks nearby, but, at two, she can’t walk to them, and, given reason number one above, I don’t know at what age we’ll be willing for her to walk to them alone. She just doesn’t have the physical space that I had growing up. If we want her outside, we often have to schedule the time.

Third, I think some of these activities ARE a great way for parents and children to spend time together. I freely admit to loving the time DD and I spend together on Monday mornings at “Mommy & Me Ballet.” She and I socialize together, and it’s lots of fun. I would’ve loved some class like that with my mom, but in the 70s, even our library story times were parent-free.

Somewhat related to this, I think there is a lot of parental guilt over work schedules and the resulting lack of “quality time.” Classes for parent and child are a way to alleviate a lot of that guilt. Some parents validly use these classes as a way to make up for time they aren’t home and, like me, to bond with their children over shared interests. (In my case, not so shared, but, hey, if she loves ballet, I’m game!) A few parents, I believe, delude themselves into thinking that scheduling lots of activities for their children somehow compensates for the parents’ absence. Maybe they think if the kids are so busy with soccer and dance the kids won’t notice (or won’t care) that their parents aren’t around and that they spend an awful lot of time with a preschool teacher, daycare provider, or a nanny.

Finally, there is the real mixed bag reason of parental desire for a child’s success. Of course, every parent wants a smart, creative, happy child. Exposing a child to a variety of activities definitely has value. I’m not so sure, though, that the way to get a smart, creative, happy child is by scheduling lots of structured activities. In fact, based purely on my personal experience and my observance of my peers, I’d say that the more tightly scheduled her day, the less smart, creative, and happy the child. Who can be smart, creative, and happy if she is tired, overstimulated, and never has any time to stretch her imagination, run around without an agenda, or just sit and breathe?

So, what do we do? Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m trying to relax. I check the sex offender registry, but I also let DD on the porch – but not in the yard – without me being right there. For now, we do one class at a time and one that involves both of us. My husband and I try to give DD as much unfettered creative play time as possible, even if it’s just in her play area of our house. We tell her to go amuse herself. We do playdates, but not more than once a week. And, all things considered, maybe, just maybe, when we’re done with ballet, there will be some soccer in her future.