Life has been more than crazy the past few weeks. As the school year looms to a close activities, concerts, exams, and endless projects have us all working late into the night. The month of May has brought major school projects and reports on Buddhism, China, and the Great Depression, a piano competition, Cecchetti Ballet exams, two piano recitals, a violin recital, the Boy Scout court of honor, school band/orchestra concerts, 6th grade olympics, 1st grade singing performance, awards ceremonies, a band festival at Knott's Berry Farm, and field trips to a local play, and Sacramento. I'm running to and fro at such a pace that I can't think straight and find myself wondering how my mom fulfilled her motherhood duties raising her five kids and two step-children while working full time. Times have changed. 2 kids is the new 4, 3 is the new 5 and 4 the new 6. And who has more than 4 in todays world anyway? Very few. Even the LDS and Catholics in our area, once known for their many children, are seeing a major decline in the family size of yesteryear. Growing up in my Southern California neighborhood there was a family with 11 kids, one with 10, a couple with 7 and several with 6. The largest family in my current neighborhood has 5 children who also boasts the largest family at the elementary school of 900 students. So why the shift? Is it that moms today simply can't handle that many kids or could it be that we're being conditioned and expected to be over-the-top helicopter parents in todays society all while working full time?
We live less than 1/2 mile from the elementary school which is in our suburban neighborhood. My girls walk to and from school every day, rain or shine. A few times each year other parents ask me if it's okay to drive them home, feeling bad they have to walk so far. Every day the boys ride their bikes home from middle school, 2 miles. Yes it's on a busy street but they ride on the sidewalk. Other parents think I'm crazy for not paying to have them ride the bus, a cost of $600/year (the days of free busses are long gone). School ends at 3:15 and they're usually home by 3:30ish, beating all the cars and the busses that are stuck in school traffic. Were we living in the 1960's this would be the norm. Long lines didn't exist in the school parking lots because kids walked or rode bikes and with the exception of the first day of school moms didn't meet children at their classroom to walk them home. Could it be that a small part of our national childhood obesity problem can be linked to kids getting rides to and from school?
Homework for elementary and middle school kids now takes several hours each afternoon, in addition to the 7 hours they just spent in school. And with that homework comes the endless projects. I remember working on projects too so that part hasn't changed except for the fact that many of todays projects are computer-based...power point presentations, computer animation projects, online research and analysis, etc. Parents know they must be ever observant while kids are on the internet, a far more dangerous tool than the glue and scissors we used in the 70's.
And then there's the whole concept of child activities. Sports for children used to mean one practice a week plus the game. Today we endure 3 to 5 lengthy practices during the week and the games on Saturdays to which we must arrive at least 1 hour early for warm-up. Kids in the "Leave it to Beaver" era used to spend time organizing their own neighborhood sports games with their friends after school. There's no time for that now. In our day, it's not enough for a little boy to enroll in a sport. He must also take music lessons, join the cub scouts, play at least one organized sport per season, enroll in a martial arts class, and attend Kumon or some such educational center after school. And when he is having trouble focusing, possibly due to his insane life, we label him ADHD and prescribe a pill to "fix" him. I came to the realization that by age 12-14 (my boys' ages) I was cooking meals for the family since my mom worked. My boys haven't had time to learn to cook. They're spending time completing homework at dinnertime, or at a football practice, etc. Growing up my siblings and I each had a dish night. To have my kids do dishes on a school night means they go to bed later and are tired the next day. Is this why after-school chores have become extinct?
The average child today is overindulged, having a wardrobe that in the 70's was reserved for the wealthy. A boy typically had 2 pairs of jeans/pants, 6 shirts, and a pair of shoes. Now, he must have the latest (and most expensive) basketball shoes, jeans in various colors/shades, 2 or 3 weeks worth of shirts, and a bunch of sports shorts with the Nike symbol. And for girls, don't even get me started on the sheer volume of clothing they expect their closets to hold. All this costs money, and a lot of it. So far gone are the days when moms would window shop with their daughters then buy a McCalls pattern to create what they saw in the store for a fraction of the price. Parents used to tell kids they could have a birthday party for friends once every 2 or 3 years at the most. Many kids today get one every year. My girls are each invited to an average of 10 large-scale birthday parties each year and complain about my every-other-year rule for their own birthday parties.
We are realizing kids aren't as creative as they used to be. With sports that are adult organized and managed, school projects and reports where qualifications are outlined in such detail they leave little room for the imagination, with clothing being picked straight from the rack without a thought of how it was designed, with distractions like TV, computer, and video games, it's easy to see why creativity is gone. And our national solution, to form another adult-run program...Common Core Curriculum and Standards which is supposed to promote thinking and creativity. Maybe what kids need is not another program. Maybe they need us to take away electronic distractions, step aside and allow them to explore, create, imagine, invent, problem solve, and play. The fact that 4 is the new 6 means our children have become far too dependent on parents, teachers, and coaches. It means parents are succumbing to the social pressure to be so heavily involved in each aspect of their kids' lives that freedom for children is a distant memory. It means we have lost our trust in the child development process and feel the need to be a helicopter, ever present to protect and assist. We are already seeing the results of the newest generation of young adults (millennials)...unwilling to work at a job that they feel is beneath them, expecting outrageous accommodations in the workplace, moving back in with parents, an inability to commit in a relationship thus delaying marriage and family, setting aside the religion of their youth, voting themselves benefits without thinking of who will pay for those benefits, and their insistence to "have it all" right now as opposed to working for it. Hundreds of articles have been written about them and their failure to thrive in society upon graduation. Shouldn't we parents be taking a step back and asking ourselves if we are the ones creating this nightmare? Perhaps the parental hovering, over-indulging, lack of chores, over-scheduling, and intensity of rehearsals, practices, and homework for children is too much. If 4 really is the new 6 maybe we need to recognize it as a problem.
