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Overscheduled?
Detect and Prevent Burnout in Your Child
By Amy Henry
Scheduling kids' lives to the max has become a cultural badge of the "good parent." Anxious to give our children a wealth of advantages, we schlep them from swimming to soccer, piano to dance – the list is circumscribed only by how many places it's possible to be at one time.
"Parents are receiving carefully marketed messages that good parents expose their children to every opportunity to excel ... and ensure their children participate in a wide variety of activities," notes a 2006 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). But when activities pile up, squeezing out everything else – play, family time, friends, sleep – kids start to crumble. Burnout rears its ugly head.
In elementary-age children, burnout tends to show up as exhaustion or agitation with peers, says Derek Shea, a school guidance counselor in Amherst, Mass. "You start to see little things, like the kid snapping back at others."
Dr. J. Kevin Nugent, director of the Brazelton Institute at Children's Hospital in Boston, and lecturer in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, sees a correlation between overscheduling and increased TV viewing in children. "TV is a passive thing," he says. "Children who are fatigued, to get away from the fast pace, they stare at the TV."
In school, the child suffering burnout may put her head on her desk to shut out the world. Or she may move restlessly about the room, unable to focus on what the class is doing. Susan Gulick, a licensed independent clinical social worker at the Children's Clinic in Northampton, Mass., lists difficulty settling down and an inability to manage feelings or to calm oneself as typical of the overscheduled child.
Many kids are avid joiners, and experts agree there are numerous benefits to be gained from extracurriculars. Sports and dance provide regular exercise. At the elementary level, kids engaged in outside activities tend to do better in school. For children who don't shine academically, the chance to develop other skills and talents boosts self-esteem, Gulick says. Group activities also grease the wheels of social interaction for shy children. It's when a child's schedule rivals that of a corporate CEO, and the majority of parent-child time occurs in the car en route to the next thing, that experts get concerned.