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.