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Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise are writing some of the most outrageous modern psychology. It's reactionary, even vaguely sinister stuff. Or so it would seem.
Take a look.
"Children are not supposed to excel, or even be good, at anything. They are, by definition, immature and unpolished. They are learning."
That's from a paper Rosenfeld recently e-mailed me, in which he and Wise prescribe boredom for children. Boredom in some regular dosage. They further urge that parents convene the family and dare to be just flat unproductive.
Are they nuts, or just dead right? I'll choose B.
Their kind of testimony carries the unmistakable whiff of anathema to the modern army of hyper-parents, who have come to regard as dereliction of duty anything that might impede the driving of Jared and Ashley to the next activity aimed at maximizing their potential in sports, music, theater, academics or, more likely, all four simul-taneously.
"The area where I live, it's very affluent," Dr. Rosenfeld was saying on the phone from his Manhattan psychiatry practice yesterday. "Nobody cannot have a [$5,000] to $10,000 swing and slide set. They're everywhere. But no one's on them because they're too busy with their scheduled activities.
"If you read Mark Twain, you'll see the real American boy story. He had to go to school and he had to go to church, and he resented it, but at least he knew that all the other time was his, and he turned out fine. We've stolen that kind of childhood."
Indeed we have, and while 19th-century life on the Mississippi may have been stolen too long ago to lament, there was a childhood still not terribly small in our rearview where the worst thing a parent could say was, "You have to come inside now."
AWWwwwWWW! For what? It ain't dark yet! Dinner?! I ain't hungry!
I think we know what happened to that childhood. Junk food peddlers and toy czars and media conglomerates looking for a callow entry point to disposable income soon figured out that when kids play outside all day, it's hard to make money off of them. "If we can keep 'em watching TV or playing video games or on the Internet," they eventually reasoned, "we can advertise to them in their every waking hour. Our very existence depends on it."
Similarly, when kids play outside on the swings for any considerable time, it cuts in on the action of toddler gymnastics classes charging a couple of hundred for some numbingly structured tumble time.
"It used to be that kids learned how to be adults by watching adults being adults," Rosenfeld said. "Now all they see is adults parenting."
Parents, he and Wise have written, ought to enjoy their adult life, which would make it a more attractive model for children to emulate.
The paperback edition of their book, "The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap," will soon be in stores. The hardcover volume that debuted more than a year ago has received virtually no criticism. It's as though we know we're hyper-parenting, but are powerless to back off.
"Parents say to me, 'But if I don't do these things, the next guy is gonna get ahead,' " Rosenfeld said. "But I tell them, if you can just cut back 5 to 7 percent, you've got a chance of recapturing your family's life, to re-establish warm relationships. That's the bedrock children need for development."
Rosenfeld and Weiss coined the term hyper-parenting and started writing basically because they saw it everywhere they looked. There hasn't exactly been an avalanche of studies on the implications of hyper-parenting, but Rosenfeld thinks a connection can be demonstrated with the increased diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder, with depression, with drugs, alcohol and sexual acting out. All of it might be triggered by the subliminal message kids get from the hyper-parent: "I'm no good in my current state. If I was any good, I wouldn't need this constant attention, constant enrichment."
It might be why some very talented kids give up on themselves.
"This style of child rearing has become part of American life," Rosenfeld said. "You have to do everything, and if you don't, kids will fail. We've created this notion that there's only one very narrow way to win in life. All we're doing with that is creating a lot of very anxious kids with a very unappealing vision of the future."
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com