10 Signs Your Kid Is Too Busy

We've all heard about the signs to look out for if your kid is using drugs -- the glassy eyes, spending less time with friends and family, apathy towards everything -- but what if the culprit isn't pills but programming -- too much of it?

The epidemic of overly-scheduled kids has caught the attention of educators, doctors and child psychologists over the past few decades. And not surprisingly, overscheduling kids leads to the same stress-related health and psychological problems that overscheduled adults experience. According to research, most kids who are overscheduled have parents from an educated, higher income bracket -- and they tend to be girls.

There's a middle ground, though, between back-to-back dance classes, soccer games, band practice and church group, and the other extreme: undirected hours of unfulfilling TV watching and phone talking.

How do you know if your kid is too busy? Watch for these signs:

 

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Comments

[J R M]

08:03 PM on 02/08/2012

My 14 year old daughter is too busy. There is nothing that can be done about it for the next 4 months - she took 6 IB/AP/College Level courses simultaneously. The courses eat all her time. She has to get her college application in within a month. And then in May she has to take the AP exams - and she is taking mostly IB courses, not AP. By mid-May she will be recovering and by late June it will be all over.

But now, it is a grim death-march.

[victorzeller]

10:02 AM on 02/07/2012

The parents are the cause of this. They don't want to be parents so they have their kids doing a million activities.

[sugarcreekchile]

01:28 PM on 02/07/2012

Too many parents push their kids into activities instead of just letting them be kids and deciding for themselves what they want to do. My oldest son was the social butterfly, involved in sports, class officer, getting involved in volunteer activities, etc. But they were his choices, not his "chauffeur's. My youngest could care less about being involved in things. I was happy when he made the high school's freshman football team and they won every game played. I was looking forward to his playing the next year and when I talked to him about signing up, he told me that he wasn't one of the better players on the team and for the amount of time he had to practice and the amount of game play he got, it wasn't worth his while and that was that. On weekends, he liked to go hiking in the mountains with his friends so he wasn't a couch potato but organized groups weren't his thing.

Both boys have grown up to be successful adults but neither was coerced to do something they didn't want to. For some parents, all the activities aren't because they don't want to be parents but because they use their kids activities for their social life and to make themselves look important. I'm sure you know the type.

[VA Jill]

05:13 PM on 02/06/2012

Up through middle school, we limited our kids to 3 activities outside of school, and one of those had to be church-related (choir, youth group, acolytes, whatever). Once they got in high school, they were pretty good about disciplining themselves. Also, by limiting their outside activities, they learned about trade-offs and that what looks like it might be more fun than, say, soccer, really wasn't. It worked for us and I see my daughter, at least, taking that approach with her sons.

[rattrap007]

08:02 AM on 02/07/2012

Not a parent, but if I ever become one I have the plan of two outside activities during school year and three in summer. They can pick what they want to do. Can be martial arts and scouts, or basketball and music lessons, etc. Their choice. If they choose to do a team activity like soccer, then they have to stick with it till the end of the season. If it is individual activity lessons like an instrument or martial arts, then they can quit at the end of the pay period.

A kid needs time to be a kid. Between school and activities I want my kids to have fun and enjoy childhood.

[VA Jill]

11:10 AM on 02/07/2012

Agreed. We had the same rules about sticking with it. Three things worked for us as long as one was church-affiliated, which didn't take up a whole lot of their time, maybe an hour a week. I did let them do more in the summer because they were bored without school.