Which Comes First, The Parents or The Kids?

I’m still resting up, or at least as much as I can considering that The Babyman is handing me the car keys and begging me to “Go! Go!” So I asked my newest blog friend, Hollee Schwartz Temple, to guest post for me.

Hollee is another wonderful woman brought into my life by my friend and partner in The BIG BIG Project. I thought I was too old and too strange and, frankly, too weary to make new friends at this late stage in my life, but I keep meeting these kindred souls who make me feel so much less alone in the world. Hollee is a fantastic writer and an even better person. Please read this and then go visit her at Becky And Hollee.

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I’m sitting in a line of parents waiting to register my kids for swimming lessons. I got here an hour and a half early. With only 14 slots for the coveted 6 p.m. class, I wasn’t risking it. So I’ve parked myself in a blue and gold folding chair to ponder a recent Wall Street Journal article on “The Myth of the Overscheduled Child.”

Ahh … the irony of it all. While I’m waiting, my younger son is attending a shofar-building activity; my older one is at a football scrimmage for 7-year-olds. A team of four adults is criss-crossing Morgantown to support these critical after-school endeavors.

But the Journal says I shouldn’t worry that I’m pushing my kids into early Xanax use because “only 6% of children spend more than 20 hours a week on extracurricular activities,” and even those kids are doing fine.

Twenty hours a week — that’s the threshold for overscheduled? It’s hard to believe that any kid would thrive on that many hours of activity, but what about the parents? If I had to schlep my boys to more than 20 hours of extracurriculars, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be steering my Honda toward the closest bridge.

Our summer’s activity list was long, varied, and bordering on crazy … two baseball camps, two basketball camps, thrice-weekly allergy shots, twice-a-week tae kwon do, family yoga on Mondays, kids’ bowling league on Fridays. I tag-teamed with our incredibly energetic 22-year-old babysitter, and the kids loved it.

I, on the other hand, felt completely exhausted by sunset.

So we started this new semester by setting some limits. G is 7, and he is just doing yoga, swimming, and football. H is almost 5, so only yoga and swimming for him.

We’re nowhere close to 20 hours, so I guess by the Journal’s standards we’re in the clear.

And yet this evening’s schedule felt like one of those LSAT analysis problems that I couldn’t conquer — there were simply too many moving parts.

You know what? I’m just not that concerned about this tipping point that the Journal mentioned, this netherworld where some small percentage of kids do too much and get sucked into the anxiety vortex.

Honestly, I’m much more worried about the parents. We’re the ones who coordinate and orchestrate and collapse after our yoga/football/swimming-weary kiddos are tucked in and tuckered out. We’re the ones who need to glue on our smiles after a crappy day at work, or feed them something halfway nutritious (even if, like today for me, we never managed to fit eating into our personal schedules).

Part of me longs for the time when I was one of those 20-plus hour kids who reveled in a jam-packed day planner. I’d get up at 4 a.m. to study before school and fill my evenings with a relay of singing and dancing classes until it was time to do it all again.

But can anyone keep up that kind of pace over the long haul? By cramming activities into every spare minute, are we asking too much of our children, and much more importantly, of ourselves?

Oops … the swimming gods are finally letting me fork over my $150 for another semester of activity. And then it’s off to pick up H, while hubby swings by to get G.

Sigh. This will have to be good enough for today, but I’m vowing to put the focus back on me tomorrow. I know all four of us will be better for it. –Hollee

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Hollee Schwartz Temple directs the legal writing program at West Virginia University College of Law. Holding both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northwestern University’s journalism school and a J.D. from Duke University School of Law, Hollee writes a bi-monthly national column on work/life balance issues for the ABA Journal, read by half of the country’s one million lawyers. She is currently working with former Chicago Sun-Times journalist Becky Beaupre Gillespie on a nonfiction book that will chronicle how the mothers of her generation are redefining success and feminism by refusing to settle for lives they don’t want.

An active scholar, speaker, and blogger, Hollee has been published in newspapers (including the Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Michigan City News-Dispatch), national law reviews and legal writing publications. She is married to nonfiction author John Temple, and is the mother of Gideon, 7, and Henry, 4.