Busy Kids

March 26, 2009

Kara Powell
Kara Powell

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In the Powell family, we’re on a hiatus from kid sports. Soccer and basketball are done and we’re taking a break. Every night we’ve been home this week, we’ve been outside, riding bikes. Usually our neighbors and their kids join us.

I know my kids are young; they are 8, 6, and 2. But I’m already starting to see the effect of busyness on their lives. Last summer, The Washington Post ran an article that was picked up by several papers around the country about teen busyness. One paragraph in particular stood out to me: Adolescent specialists “contend that some BlackBerry-tethered parents, who equate being constantly busy with being successful in their own lives, compete to see whose kids can cram in the most activities: pre-dawn swim practice, weekend travel soccer tournaments, elite ballet classes, Mandarin lessons, SAT tutoring sessions. Unstructured time, which experts say is essential to figuring out who one is and what one wants, tends to be regarded as laziness or being unproductive.”

Ouch. It’s easy for me to imagine myself becoming one of those parents. And I have encountered plenty of them in our youth ministry. I’m guessing you have too.

What if we started a new kind of peer pressure – a positive one – in which adults (parents, youth leaders) started removing pressure from kids? What if the new “cool” way to be a teenager was to have a less structured and less busy life?

I’ll think about it tonight after dinner when I’m out with my kids and our neighbors…

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute

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  • http://www.ylhelp.com Sean McGever

    I agree. My kids are 6,4 and 2 and I’m fighting the pull for my kids to get involved with everything right away. I coach high school sports and I cannot tell who started playing at 5 or 9 years old. (I can tell who started playing in 6th, 7th or 8th grade). But I can tell what parents started their kids at 5… sadly many of them have a sense of entitlement, I think because of their personal investment/trade-off in time/money/family time. They expect something back regardless of the skill level of their kid.

    I like the bike rides. Also one of my main pushes to get kids to camp is “do you want a week off where you don’t have sports, school work, an all-together busy schedule… a week where you can simply relax and have fun?” That attracts them more then anything that the camp has.

  • http://www.fulleryouthinstitute.org Kara Powell

    Sean, I know what you’re saying about entitlement with parents. I see that too – in churches, schools, and community organizations.

    I realize that in many neighborhoods, bike rides aren’t practical. I moved in September and it wasn’t practical in my old neighborhood. But I hope families can look to find things to do that are unstructured that fit their context.

    I’m reading a book called “Play” – I might blog about it next week.

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