This is a continuation to my Saturday post, which was a continuation to my Thursday post! So you may want to scroll down and read those first. But here's the basic problem I'm looking at: do we as parents sign our children up for too many activities, and does that have a toll on our family time? I believe it does, and I laid it out on Saturday that the average family with school aged kids has, at maximum, 19 hours a week of potential quality time. That's not much. And that's before they do any lessons. Take skating for 8 hours a week and you're down to 11. Not a pretty picture.
But let's take this one step further. I believe that with parenting it is so important to keep the long-term goal in mind. We talked on Saturday about what those goals for our children should be. Let's focus today on one specific one, and one very general one. First, the specific: we want our kids to develop fitness habits. After all, one of the reasons that we put our kids in sports lessons is so that they can stay fit! We live in a very sedentary society, and we need to encourage all the exercise we can, right?
I'm not so sure. I took ballet a ton as a child. Two nights a week when I was 13 and 14, one night a week from 6-13. I actually was quite good. And you know what? I can't do any of it now. I took adult ballet lessons when I was 30 for fun, and wrecked my knee because I tried to do the "turn-out" as much as I did at 14, and found my body no longer cooperated. Ballet isn't the type of thing you can just keep doing. It doesn't keep you fit. Sure it keeps you fit then, and it does help your posture (and it taught me to suck my stomach in, which I still do today), but you can't keep it up. There's no natural place "just to do ballet" in your life. So it doesn't encourage long-term fitness.
What about sports? Hockey and soccer are almost the same. Some men are involved in leagues as adults, as are fewer women, but it's not widely done as an adult. So you can't rely on those things to keep you fit. You may love them, but if you're only playing hockey as an adult once a week over the course of four months, it isn't going to cut it.
Skating or gymnastics? Don't even get me started. Those aren't going to keep you fit as an adult, either.
There's really only one sport that I can see that does have the potential to keep you fit, and that would be swimming. (And, of course, track and field, but few children do this as an extracurricular activity.) So you may have your child in some sport for 5-10 hours a week, and that sport will do diddly squat for them when they are adults. It isn't going to encourage fitness. It's simply going to keep them fit right now. There is some benefit to that, of course, and those kids who like being fit are more likely to adopt other fitness activities, but the sport itself won't do much.
If you really want your children to be fit, they need to develop habits that they can continue easily as an adult. And what are such habits? Biking. Walking. Playing soccer and frisbee and touch football with family. Working out at the Y together (if they have kids' programs). Swimming together. Cross-country skiing. Jogging. As kids get older, these are all things you can do with them, which will keep you fit, too. They contribute to family time, they don't take away from it. And they're more likely to meet your goals of raising a child who is healthy than putting that child into hockey 10 hours a week. Even more importantly, if your child is in extracurricular activities multiple nights a week, you won't have time to develop these activities as a family. So they won't get done.
Now let's look at something more general. I believe that children who are most likely to adopt their parents' value systems are those children who most identify with their parents and their family as the primary influence in their lives. They're kids who enjoy their parents, enjoy their family, and want to remain close. Kids who primarily identify with peers do not tend to adopt their parents' value systems, as Judith Harris' book The Nurther Assumption showed.
How, then, do you get kids to identify with the family? You have fun. You hang out. You spend time together. You make the default in their lives "being with the family". So many times kids are in so many activities that their primary relationships aren't even with siblings anymore. And if you stop identifying with your siblings or your parents to such a great extent, it's unlikely that "family" will be considered your first priority.
You can't just have fun on a schedule. You need downtime for that. You need time for people to laugh, and be themselves. You need time for siblings to decide that spending time together is actually worth it. Often kids need to get bored before they will do something together, but if everything is hyper scheduled, they're never bored, and they don't turn to each other.
There's nothing wrong with boredom. It's the birthplace of many a great idea or great game. Kids get bored, so they need to find something to do. That's when they reach out to little, bratty brothers or sisters. That's when they make up games. That's when they use their imagination.
Let's stop giving our kids deliberately to a schedule which denies them so much family time. They may enjoy it at the time, but in the long run, what is the most important goal for your family? Some families may be able to squeeze everything in, and more power to you! But I have seen families who have thought they were doing it well, only to find fifteen years later that their kids weren't following God and weren't overly involved with their families. It's a big risk. It may be one you want to take, because your child is gifted or really wants to do something. Just realize it's a risk. Count the cost first, so that you can be sure that you are doing everything you can to preserve your family life in the time you have left. But I hope most of you may choose just to hang out at home and maybe, occasionally, throw a football around together. I think, in the long run, that may be more valuable.
A fundamental premise of Economics is that everything has an opportunity cost. If I buy a chocolate bar, I'm not buying a pop with that money. So the opportunity cost of the chocolate bar is whatever I could have bought--a can of pop, 20 jujubes, two stamps, whatever.
But while we're used to opportunity cost when it comes to money, we don't tend to think of it when it comes to time. And yet the time crunch can be just as acute as the budget crunch. As commenter Valleygirl said earlier this week (and I paraphrase), why do we yearn so much for those bygone years of sitting on the porch, and then overschedule our lives so much that we have no time for it?
When you schedule your own lives, or your kids' lives, with many activities, you're simultaneously denying them whatever else they could have done with that time. There is an opportunity cost.
So much for Economics. Now let's turn to Math. Let's look at how much disposable time the average mom with school-aged kids has in the course of a week. We'll be nice and even assume that she doesn't have an outside job, to give her as much time as possible.
Weekday mornings, before school, are a write off. You rush around and get the kids on the bus or out the door. Not really quality time. Then they're at school, usually home around 4:00. So let's begin our day at 4. Most kids are in bed by 9, so that leaves 5 hours per weekday.
On the weekends, let's give you 12 hours a day, with 12 for sleeping. Over the course of the week, that gives you 49 hours. For comparison's sake, the kids spend about 40 hours in school and with school peers. So it's almost even.
Now let's start being realistic:
Time spent making dinner, doing laundry, cleaning up, mopping the floor, and other housework that can't wait: 1 hour a day (and I'm being nice. It's probably more). Down to 42 hours.
Time spent doing homework with your child: 1 hour a day (this can include anything that goes into organizing them for school). Down to 35 hours.
Time spent on meetings or with other adults. Chances are you have at least one during the week: a committee meeting, a small-group meeting, an evening out with the girls, dinner out with your husband, whatever: 3 hours a week. Down to 32 hours.
Time your child spends in front of some sort of screen. The average child spends 3.5 hours a day in front of either a video game, computer, or television. But let's be nice. Let's say it's only 1.5 hours a day. Down to 22 hours.
Time your child spends bathing, getting dressed, cleaning their room, or looking after him or herself. 1/2 hour a day, or 3 hours a week. Down to 19 hours.
So in a family with no play dates, no working mother, very little technology addiction, and no lessons only gets 19 hours a week of quality time when people aren't doing housework, aren't in a meeting, aren't taking a shower, and aren't making dinner. That's 19 hours when you can potentially hang out with your child, take a walk, play a game, do a hobby in the same room, talk, or spend time together. I would guess that for many families it's less than that.
Note, too, that schools get 40 hours. Schools have 40 hours, you have 19. How are you going to spend those 19? Some of them are going to be spent eating dinner as a family. Some will be spent in church (I counted that as quality family time, though chances are for most of that your children won't be with you). You don't have a lot of time to work with.
And in those 19 hours you have to teach them to do chores, to become independent, to love God, to be responsible, to not give in to peer pressure, to handle money well, to be nice to their friends, and to get along with their siblings. That's a heavy task.
So let's look at it from another point of view. What is it that you want your child to be like as an adult? What are the most important things for you to pass on? If I were to rank them, I would say this:
1. Love Jesus 2. Be able to form close personal relationships (including, I hope, marriage and motherhood) 3. Be independent, able to get a job when they need one and able to care for their own homes. 4. Be responsible with money and personal possessions 5. Be generous. 6. Adopt healthy attitudes and behaviours (including fitness).
Perhaps some are out of order. Obviously I would like them to reach all of those goals. But I would rather have a child who is 300 lbs. and who loves Jesus than one who is fit but can't hold a job and doesn't know God. So fitness, while it's important, is lower on the list.
Therefore, if those are my priorities, in that order, how am I working towards them? They're not automatically going to develop those traits. They need to be taught, nurtured, and mentored in them. They need to be shown, as they hit the teen years, that the culture which preaches against almost all of these things is wrong and not something you want to emulate.
And if your children are in school, you are fighting against a system that for 40 hours a week teaches that God is irrelevant to their lives. It teaches things that are not conducive to forming healthy marriages. It teaches unhealthy attitudes. It does very little to teach responsibility. So not only do you only have 19 hours to teach these things; you need to dedicate some of those hours to explicitly working against what the school is already teaching.
That's why I'm adamant about family time. It is more important than sports lessons. It is more important than music lessons. You can never get that time back. And the more time your child spends away from your family, the more time he or she spends immersed in a culture which, in many ways, is antithetical to what you believe, especially if you are Christian. Sports may teach discipline, for instance, but they teach it absent from God. They teach it as its own reward, rather than being a spiritual discipline in and of itself. You can become too focused on performance and worth in that arena, rather than on worth as a human being.
On Monday I'm going to add one more thought regarding sports lessons, and one more regarding siblings, but this post is getting long enough as it is. So what do you think? Please, let's discuss this! Am I off base? Do I have my calculations wrong? Have I left something important out? Let me know!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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