Parental stress

Sandra Hofferth was so concerned about the welfare of over-scheduled, stressed-out kids that she sought to define the damage ambitious parents were doing to their offspring. "I started out with a pretty solid belief that lots and lots of activities are bad for children," said the director of the University of Maryland's Population Research Center.

Plenty of parents, academics, educators and family pundits shared her hypothesis. Anecdotal stories of busy kids suffering from depression and anxiety have filled newspapers, magazines, Web sites and bookshelves for years.

So imagine Ms. Hofferth's surprise when research found that, to borrow from The Who, the kids are all right.

Studies have confirmed that participation in structured activities such as sports, music lessons and youth groups can be directly linked to success in school, healthy emotional development, a positive family life and socially acceptable behavior. Moreover, the children at highest risk of negative outcomes and poor behavior are those who participate in no activities at all. Only a small minority of children can be considered over-scheduled, the research found.

But the most interesting finding of Ms. Hofferth's research involves not children, but their parents -- Mom and Dad are the ones who are stressed out.

Parents feel pressure to provide their children with athletic and cultural opportunities, pressure getting the kids to all their activities and pressure that they might be pushing Tommy and Susie too hard.

"I found the opposite of what I expected," Ms. Hofferth said. "Parents are having trouble with it, and they're the ones who are having a hard time trying to figure out how to manage children's lives as well as their own."

But how can adults find balance in a litigious society that discourages childhood independence and indoctrinates parents with the view that sexual predators lurk on every street corner? It wasn't all that long ago that children, even those still in elementary school, were counted on to get themselves to school and back, as well as after-school practices and lessons. Now parents are expected to drive their kids to destinations less than a mile away, then stand watch until the activity wraps up.

The solution to parental stress lies not in "managing" children's lives, as Ms. Hofferth says, but in teaching them how to manage their lives themselves.