Kids' hectic activity programs stress out parents

In an age when many parents are struggling to find a balance between their offspring's out of school activities and their own needs and pleasures, new research has found that as far as middle-class children are concerned, these organized activities are linked to positive outcomes in school, emotional development, family life and behaviour.

The research also goes some way to dispel the notion that many children today are over scheduled and as a result overstressed. The research shows in fact that the children most at risk have no activities at all and it may be only their parents who are overloaded.

Research based on data about how children spend their days shows that only a minority are heavily scheduled and a higher level of activity was not linked to such stress symptoms as depression, anxiety, alienation and fearfulness.

Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland at College Park and lead author of the research says the premise that the children who are more active are more stressed was not so and the opposite of what was expected was found.

Hofferth says however that parental stress might be another matter and she believes many parents are having trouble trying to figure out how to manage children's lives as well as their own.

A warning from the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2006 advised that a hurried lifestyle could create anxiety or contribute to depression for some children and this new research is bound to cause some controversy among many who say over scheduling is a major source of childhood stress.

Experts say the phenomenon is real and many studies do not consider the driving time that parents contribute or the reality that many families have multiple children with conflicting activities.

For her research Hofferth studied children ages 9 to 12, which she says is the age group most heavily involved in extra activities. Hofferth says the best off were the 58% with a more balanced approach of one or two activities, for less than four hours over a two day period - but she says highly involved children, about 25%, did almost as well.

Hofferth's study data came from interviews with children and parents as well as detailed time-use diaries of 331 youngsters from white middle and upper-middle-class families across the U.S. Comparable data for middle- and upper-middle-class African American children was apparently very similar.

Hofferth says the 17% of children with no activities were a particular concern because that group were more withdrawn and socially immature, with lower self-esteem.