For the Parents in the Crowd

For all of you mommies and daddies out there, this week's Boston Globe Magazine has a special issue devoted to the theme of "parenting." There are several interesting articles, including an amusing piece on parental sex lives, an article on the lives of the growing numbers of single dads, one on childrens' diets, and much more. One paragraph in one article stood out to me and annoyed me to no end. In what I thought was an interesting piece questioning whether the increasingly prevalent idea of the over-scheduled child is something of a suburban myth, the authors (responsibly) went to the author of a book espousing the case of the too-busy child in response to a study by Yale child psychologists questioning what has now become the conventional wisdom of overtaxed children. Here is what he said:

"Baloney. Nonsense," says Alvin Rosenfeld, Greenwich, Connecticut-based coauthor of The Over-Scheduled Child. "You can come up with any statistical analysis that you want. But I challenge you to go to any upper-middle-class neighborhood and ask 20 moms and tell me I’m wrong. Ask any hockey parent."

Now I come neither to bury nor to praise the idea that kids may or may not be overscheduled. But if this is the best he can come up with, Alvin Rosenfeld, Greenwich, Connecticut-based coauthor of The Over-Scheduled Child, is a jackass. Obviously he has a dog in this hunt. He wants to sell more books espousing his theory. But look at the callous disregard of facts and evidence. Instead, he challenges you to gather anecdotes (anecdotal evidence, by the way, can be fine, but usually to supplement not supplant other data) to find out not how busy the kids are, but rather how busy the parents are. And his topper is to ask hockey parents. (Even in Boston, what percentage of kids do you think play hockey?) So forget those pointy-headed Yale guys. Rosenfeld believes in his argument. And he believes that parents will believe his argument. Even though a good number of those parents will have multiple children, and so they might be run ragged even if the kids are actually functioning in appropriately scheduled worlds. Plus, parents in any era would have answered that they were run ragged. How does that tell us that over time those parents are more harried. (Hint: It doesn't.)In any case, that bugged me and I have thus devoted much more time to it than it deserved.

But the article on parent sex amused me and for those of you with kids, the whole issue will surely be of some interest. (My own inordinate attention to the issue probably stems from the fact that we have our [!!] three goddaughters, 8, 10, 12, with us for the month, and so suddenly these issues are not just abstractions.)