Raising Your Kids After Divorce

Raising Your Kids After Divorce

The risks of the over-scheduled child

Posted to Resource Articles by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld on Sun, 07/11/2010 - 8:28am

Is your child “missing” activities because you can’t afford them, or don’t have time to take him, or the schedule interferes with his father’s visitation? Stop worrying. You may be doing your child a big favor. Less can actually be more.

Here is the first of six articles for FWW by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of “The Over-Scheduled Child”:

Many devoted American parents enroll their children in near-endless, costly activities.

When couples divorce and Mom — the parent usually left as the one primarily responsible for raising the kids — is left with far less expendable income, she is often worried that if she deprives her kids of these activities, their only acceptance letter will be to the Lower Southeast Sonoma County Junior College’s night extension program.

They will have miserable lives, and she — and she alone — will be to blame. Given that equation, what choice does she really have?

Is the equation true? Anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite.

Leonard Bernstein started playing the piano not at 4 but at 10; until George Gershwin discovered music, he specialized — apparently with considerable success — in being a child hoodlum.

I have been told that unlike Tiger Woods’s near neo-natal success, Michael Jordan did not make his high school junior varsity basketball team at first.

Exceptional people find their true calling later in life, in overcoming their own – or a loved one’s – handicap. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone because he was struggling to find a way to help cure his wife’s family’s inherited deafness.

In my experience, many (if not most) creative people select as a life’s work not what came easily to them but what they had to work hard to be good at.

And while hyper-parenting implies that everything can be planned — and a divorced Mom who can’t afford tennis lessons should be anxious — many crucial events are serendipitous. Sometimes, recognizing the implications of accidents leads to the truly great discoveries.

One such mistake – breadcrumbs accidentally dropped on an agar plate – led Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin.

I am not saying that hard work and enrichment activities are not valuable. They can add enormously to making life full and meaningful. They can help children find their passions, teach them the value of perseverance and teamwork, and help them build friendships.

But if they add large amounts of anxiety, frenetic activity, and uncertainty into family relationships, they can be harmful.

 

Related Content:

Click the following for The Over-Scheduled Child: Raising Your Kids After Divorce Part 2: Over-scheduling from the Cradle

Click the following to return a directory of articles and resource videos on Kids, Family and Divorce

“The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper Parenting Trap,” by Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, can be purchased in paperback through Amazon.