When Hilary Gibaut was a new mom, she looked to other moms in her neighbourhood for guidance. “When they got together, the main topic was their kids — how well they were doing, what classes they were doing and how smart their children would be because of it,” she remembers. “They talked at length about where I could find the “right’ stackable measuring cups for my son to play with at bath time. I didn’t get it. These kids couldn’t even crawl yet. Was measuring liquid that important? I went home feeling very inadequate and decided if I needed stackable measuring cups or a class came up that Matthew would benefit from, I would sign us up.”

Soon the Toronto mom was signing her son up for playgroups, skating, kinder gym, kinder jazz, T-ball and swimming — the latter an exhausting effort that had her son screaming in terror. “He couldn’t have cared less about any of the other kids or what the instructors were doing. He has always had his own agenda and moved at his own pace regardless of how hard I may have pushed or nudged him in a certain direction.”

For Catherine Decelles, the urge to enroll her son, Luc, in multiple lessons came from wanting to expose him to “absolutely everything.” “We were so excited that we were finally able to sign him up for activities that didn’t require us that we went a bit overboard,” says the Red Deer, Alta., mom of two. At one point he was in preschool three days a week, skating lessons twice a week, plus swimming and soccer. But the demanding schedule began to take its toll. “Not only was I exhausted from driving him around and carting a baby, but he was overstimulated.” Plus, says Decelles, “we missed out on playdates with his friends, which was important for him, but so important for me to visit with other moms.”

Finally, the family ended up paring back. “We realized we were capable of teaching our children how to skate and how to play sports and games. I am not sure why we thought we needed to sign him up for lessons when the cheaper and more fun alternative was just to take him ourselves.”

more play, fewer classes

While it might be tempting to sign your preschooler up for every supposed brain-building activity as soon as she is old enough, Carl Honoré, author of Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (Random House), says as a general rule, children this age thrive most in
activities that aren’t structured. “And anyone who has had any experience trying to structure, schedule, benchmark and monitor a three-and-half-year-old knows that that is not a natural state for those children.”

Honoré acknowledges that for certain activities, such as gymnastics, it can make sense to have coaching and lessons early on, but he advises parents to take their cues from their kids to gauge their interest. “At the end of the day it should be the child who is leading through his or her own curiosity and passion for the activity,” says the dad of two.

Signs of an over-scheduled child may include:

• Being tired and exhausted. “You can see that often in their faces, dark circles under their eyes, falling asleep in the backseat on the way to the activity,” he says.
• Struggling to make use of free time for inventive play. “When a little opening in the schedule presents itself, the child doesn’t know what to do and instantly gets bored,” explains Honoré.
• Doesn’t talk about the activity away from it. “If a child is really engaged in something, whether it’s hockey or cello or whatever, they will talk about it at the breakfast table, they will talk to their friends about it and they will want to do it when they are not obliged to by the schedule. They will seek it out.”

letting go

The pressure to enroll our children in extra-curricular activities is enormous, but Honoré suggests parents think about their own social circle and how they grew up. “Were they all in Suzuki piano or violin at two? My guess is that they weren’t.” He adds, “Some kids come to stuff later in life and they need time, space and freedom to work out who they are rather than what we want them to be. I think a child that’s over-scheduled doesn’t have that space.”

Gibaut says it has taken years to realize that “although my intentions were good, the pressure I put on myself, and possibly on my son, was a waste of time.” She tries now not to do the same thing with her daughter Sarah, 5. “Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

CF’s senior editor Robin Stevenson has made the mistake of signing up daughter Charlotte, 5, for classes without gauging her interest first — with disastrous results. She vows never to do that again.