Schedule some dawdle time for overscheduled kids

"Whoever shows up shows up," said Heather Magruder, who used to coach her 8-year-old son, Dylan, and 7-year-old daughter, Corey, in the Y league. "If somebody's mom calls them in to dinner, you just readjust the teams."

"We wanted our kids to have experiences closer to what we had," Magruder said. "You picked sides, put a goal down, and you played." Or you didn't. Today, however, "your kid has to know how to do everything by age 8," she said, adding, "It's more important for us to be a sane family and not just spend our time running from here to there."

A generation ago, the latchkey child was the most forlorn image in the parental universe. Now it is the overscheduled child, who, whether driven by parental ambition or the necessity for afternoon supervision, never stops moving. Jumping from Spanish to karate, tap dancing to tennis -- with hours of homework waiting at home -- the overscheduled child is as busy as a new law firm associate.

But many parents have begun resisting the push to avail their children of every planned activity that a retail society can offer. These dissenters say they prefer to give their children plenty of time just to be children, to spend less time in car pools and more in sandboxes and spontaneous dodge-ball games.

Many parents -- if not their children -- are simply ready to slow down. Nancy Eisen Fitzer, who helped organize the informal soccer league in Greenville that her son, Isaac, 7, and daughter, Shona, 4, play in, said that she and her husband, Matthew Fitzer, wanted to "step off the high-pressure merry-go-round" of youth achievement.

"When I talk to some of these parents whose kids are going to swim practice eight times a week, and they say, 'She loves it -- it's so much fun,' I wonder, How fun?" Fitzer said. "Some kids thrive on that kind of schedule, but my own child is very sensitive about not having down time."

In her community, Fitzer said, there is an expectation that children join organized sports at 4.

Of course, pulling back is rarely as easy as it sounds. "How do you get a mother to say, 'I don't feel like I'm a chauffeur' for a change?" said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist in Manhattan and an author of "The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap" (Griffin, 2001). "When you try to cut back, there are pressures from neighbors who say, 'You're not taking Johnny to soccer?' and you feel somewhat insecure, as people tend to be, particularly about their parenting."

Such laments may be unfounded, some experts say. "I don't believe in the hurried child for a minute," said Sandra L. Hofferth, a professor of family studies at the University of Maryland who, with John F. Sandberg, conducted a study in 1997 on the ways children use their time.

Their report, published in 2001 in The Journal of Marriage and the Family, was based on interviews with 2,119 children age 3 through 12 nationwide and compared their answers with those from a nearly identical study in 1981. It showed that, although children averaged 1 hour 10 minutes more each week in 1997 than in 1981 on organized sports, 20 minutes more on studying, 2 hours 43 minutes more in day care and 2 hours more in school, they still had time to play for 12 hours and watch television for 13. "There is a lot of time that could be used for other things," Hofferth said.

Even so, family-life pundits and grass-roots support groups are driving a scattered revolt against what they see as overscheduling. Putting Family First, an organization based in Wayzata, Minn., sponsored "Take Back Your Family Time Week" in October. "We're helping people with the problem of overscheduled kids and underconnected families," said William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the university of Minnesota, who helped establish the group in 1999.

Last March in Ridgewood, N.J., 91 percent of all households with grade-school children agreed to cancel all sports games, evening events and homework for one day. Called Ridgewood Family Night (motto: "Ready, Set, Relax!"), it was organized by parents, school officials and religious leaders with help from the Family Counseling Service, a local nonprofit agency. "It was like a snow day without snow," said Marcia Marra, the agency's manager of community initiatives. "You could do whatever you wanted without pressures."

When children do regain free time, it can leave their parents worried that they are forfeiting the chance for a competitive edge or a crucial bonding moment with a team or a scout troop. Adrianne Bajtay of Vancouver, Wash., recalls being troubled by an acquaintance's suggestion that her 6-year-old son, Mark, was being deprived because he spent time alone drawing and assembling books of his artworks instead of playing indoor soccer, as he had for two seasons. At Mark's age, Bajtay said, "the kids weren't really interacting with each other." So she decided to wait to sign him up again.

"We're just kind of fighting against the tide," she added. "There's pressure always to join."

Indeed, adults feel as much peer pressure as the children themselves, said Betsy Taylor, the author of "What Kids Really Want That Money Can't Buy: Tips for Parenting in a Commercial World" (Warner Books, 2003). "It takes guts," she said, "to pull back from that and ask, Is this really healthy for my child?"

Much of the pressure is seasonal: Parents are just now bracing for the fall soccer season. Spring is even busier, thanks to the lengthening days and the necessity to prepare for standardized tests, said Renee Schlechter of Allentown, Pa.

Schlechver's daughters, Brittney, 9, and Kelsey, 6, juggle activities like soccer, field hockey, softball and T-ball throughout the year, as well as piano and violin lessons and Sunday school. "We had only the months of July and August with no sport," Schlechter said.

For the moment, she said, life is relatively calm because her younger daughter has soccer only one day and one night a week. "She said, 'I love Saturdays, because I don't have a sport and I can play with my friends,'" Schlechter recalled.

For some families, though, it's full speed ahead. "We're not scaling back," said Alfred Tibbetts, a lawyer in Darien, Conn. His wife, Gwynne Tibbetts, puts about 300 miles a week on their car shuttling their three children -- girls age 9 and 6 and a boy, 8 -- to dance, piano and soccer. School lets out at 4 p.m., and their other commitments often keep them away from home until 7. "And then on the weekends, they've got their gales," Tibbetts said. "Scaling back is something we always talk about as a fantasy."