Archive for September 4th, 2009

I have an essay on the Taste page of the Wall Street Journal this morning called “The Myth of the Overscheduled Child.”

The gist: For all the scolds like to fret about kids being pushed too hard, many children do absolutely no after-school sports or activities (and very little homework). The average child doesn’t spend too many hours on these things, and even children who spend more than 20 hours per week on activities don’t do badly because of it. That’s not to say that no child out there has been pushed to anxiety, but the problem is when this small slice of the American population sets the tone for the rest. It undercuts support for the additional school work and after-school activities that less privileged children truly need.

As a side note, the Wall Street Journal is the newspaper that actually gets delivered, in its physical, dead-tree format, to my house. I still get a thrill from opening a newspaper and seeing my byline in it. I suppose this is a thrill I’m going to need to get over as we advance into the digital age.