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FOR
Jessica Huey, the circumstances preceding the episodes
she calls her “nervous breakdowns” were always the same:
She was exhausted, it was 1 a.m. and she still faced a
mountain of homework due when school started at 7:20 the
next morning. “I would look around and think, ‘I can’t
possibly get this all done,’ and then burst into tears,”
said Huey, 17, who is scheduled to start her senior year
at a Maryland high school next month. Even while she was
weeping, Huey recalled, she felt she was wasting
valuable time.
Her
freakouts, Huey said, were a consequence of a frenetic
schedule, which last year included three Advanced
Placement (AP) classes, a part in the school musical
that required frequent rehearsals sometimes stretching
until 10 pm, a regular babysitting job, participation in
both a school and church chorus, membership in a club
for students interested in business, a volunteer weekend
gig as a candy striper, SAT prep classes, driver
training and homework that averaged three hours a night.
“I’m
always in a state of anxiety, but it only piles up every
few months,” she said, adding, “All my friends do this.
We’re all over-scheduled. We live in Bethesda: It’s a
way of life.”
And not
just in Bethesda. Anisha Abraham, who works at
Georgetown University Hospital as chief of adolescent
medicine and in a school-based clinic at a D.C. high
school, said she routinely encounters students who go
from a full day of classes to a job in a fast-food
restaurant that ends at 11 pm.
“These
kids have no time for themselves,” Abraham said. A
growing number of the teenagers she sees complain of
similar symptoms: Exhaustion, headaches, stomach
problems, depression and irritability, a consequence of
so little free time. “Our teenagers are becoming more
over-scheduled and over-stressed.”
Despite
warnings by experts, including the American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP), which in 2006 issued a report about
the perils of “pressure-filled intense preparation for a
high-achieving adulthood,” and a recent spate of popular
books including The Overachievers, there are few
indications that high-school students will face an
altered landscape anytime soon.
Adolescent medicine specialists say that a primary cause
of the apparent pervasiveness of this relentless
activity is demographic: The number of applications to
the nation’s colleges is expected to peak with the class
of 2009 and won’t begin to decline for several more
years. Although there is no precise definition of
over-scheduling and little empirical research
documenting its impact, pediatricians, psychologists and
child psychiatrists say the problem is real.
They
contend that some BlackBerry-tethered parents, who
equate being constantly busy with being successful in
their own lives, compete to see whose kids can cram in
the most activities: predawn swim practice, weekend
travel soccer tournaments, elite ballet classes,
Mandarin lessons, SAT tutoring sessions. Unstructured
time, which experts say is essential to figuring out who
one is and what one wants, tends to be regarded as
laziness or being unproductive.
“Our
definition of what makes a kid successful has become
unbearably narrow,” said California psychologist
Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, a
2006 book that documented the psychological fallout of
unrealistic expectations and packed schedules on
affluent teenagers.
The
toxic combination of perfectionism and over-scheduling
can lead to excesses such as those seen by University of
Pennsylvania adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth
Ginsburg, author of the AAP recommendations. Ginsburg
said his patients have included a teenager who had
started studying for the SATs at age 11 and high-school
students whose parents told them they “didn’t need to
bother to go to college” if they didn’t get into either
Harvard or Yale, schools that last year reported
record-low acceptance rates hovering around 8 percent.
Sometimes, he noted, teenagers who say they can’t
imagine life without a packed schedule and profess to
“love” hours of extracurricular activities are really
afraid of disappointing their parents by opting out or
scaling back.
Janice
Huey, Jessica’s mother, said she and her husband have
stepped in to curtail their older daughter’s schedule,
but they want to give her the freedom to make her own
decisions and her own mistakes. (Case in point: three
simultaneous Advanced Placement classes, which her
mother advised against.)
Last
spring, at Jessica’s request, her parents blocked her
access to Facebook and instant messaging to prevent her
from spending too much time on both. They also told her
she could not try out for the spring play because her
schedule was too full.
“It just
kind of gets out of control sometimes,” Janice Huey said
of Jessica’s schedule. “I am an extremely bad role
model,” she added. “I completely over-volunteer.”
Mother
and daughter say they hope that Jessica’s activities and
grades will land her a spot in a competitive college and
possibly scholarship money.
Child
psychiatrist Michael Brody said that in the past 15
years, summer has become more an extension of the
academic year than a respite from it.
“Camp
seems to end earlier now” for many kids, Brody said. For
many high-school students, the progression used to be
camper, then CIT (counselor in training) and then a job
as a full-fledged counselor.
“A lot
of kids don’t do that now,” said Brody, who has
practiced in the Washington area for more than three
decades. Rather than working at a camp, “they’ve got to
go discover the cure for cancer by working at NIH for
the summer. And you can’t just play a sport; you have to
play several, and be in leagues during the summer and
get coaching. It’s all done for resume-building.”
Not
everyone regards the proliferation of organized
activities as a problem.
In 2006,
around the time that the pediatrics group issued its
warning, psychologist Joseph Mahoney, then an associate
professor at Yale, and two colleagues published a study
debunking what they called “the over-scheduling myth.”
Based on
an analysis of previous research, Mahoney’s team
concluded that fewer than one in 10 youths could be
described as over-scheduled and that 40 percent did not
participate in any organized activities. Teenagers who
did participate averaged fewer than 10 hours per week,
Mahoney reported, while fewer than 6-percent devoted 20
hours or more to extracurricular activities. The
researchers also challenged the notions that parental
pressure was to blame for over-scheduling and that a
lack of free time caused undue stress.
Mahoney,
now at the University of California at Irvine, declined
to discuss his research, which appeared in Social Policy
Report.
Some
experts say that Mahoney’s critique may be aimed at
shoring up funding of after-school programs, which could
be an easy target for politicians.
“He’s
kind of looking at different things,” adolescent
medicine specialist Ginsburg said of Mahoney’s
conclusions. “Some kids need more enrichment activities,
and other kids are over-enriched.”
“This is
a very nuanced phenomenon,” Ginsburg added. One teenager
may deftly juggle a schedule that another would find
overwhelming.
“Parents
should look at their child and see whether what they’re
doing is giving them joy” or whether they seem anxious
or stressed, Ginsburg said. “All kids need some downtime
and the flexibility to change their focus when they
want.”
Later
this month, said California psychologist Levine,
Stanford University’s School of Education is scheduled
to unveil a program called Challenge Success, a
nationwide effort designed to help high schools, parents
and students redefine the notion of success.
Among
the goals, said Levine, who is affiliated with the
program, is to persuade high schools to agree to make
simple changes designed to reduce over-scheduling.
They
include “enforcing lunch,” not allowing students to skip
lunch to take a class or do extra work; allotting 20
minutes in the middle of the day to permit students to
“just hang out”; and limiting the number of AP classes a
student can take at one time.
“This is
about reframing your message of what the purpose of
school is, which is that it’s not the best thing to be
busy every minute of your life,” Levine said.
About 60
high schools in the United States and Canada have signed
on, she said.
Jessica
Huey has been relishing a summer largely devoid of
scheduled activities other than her job herding five
year olds as a day camp counselor. The weeks when she
got a total of eight hours of sleep are a fading memory,
she added. “It’s been fabulous,” she said.
But
Jessica and her mother are braced for the demands of
senior year and the unforgiving calendar of the college
application process.
“I’m
hoping next year will be easier,” Janice Huey said. |
