Overscheduled?

On a recent, sweltering Tuesday, I picked up one daughter from a friend's house and deposited another at a piano lesson before the last leg of the Hebrew-school car-pool route. If I negotiated the parking-lot drop-off successfully, I would have time to beg the butcher for something I could cook during the 10-minute slot allocated for dinner preparation/homework assistance/personal time.

As I considered possibilities (raw-meat sandwiches?), a little voice piped up from the backseat. "Do you know what I want for my birthday?" Having forgotten exactly who remained in the car, I fell back on a generic response: "Chocolate cake, pink-frosting flowers and a personalized birthday serenade from a famous teenybopper-heartthrob band?" The voice replied, "No, I want to stay home and play with friends in the backyard."

Why not ask for a pony? Rerouting my overscheduled family toward an afternoon of free time is a task that would make hardened air-traffic controllers weep. It's small comfort to know that we echo the rest of America: a recent University of Michigan study determined that kids' free time had decreased 16% in a single generation. After asking 1,900 kids, ages 3 to 13, to keep a 24-hour diary (the little ones got help from parents), researcher Sandra Hofferth found that free time decreased dramatically from 1981 to 1997, from 63 hours a week to a mere 51.

This means kids spend more time in after-school programs and less time riding bikes aimlessly in the neighborhood, more hours on the soccer field and fewer listening to dinner-table criticism about how bolting down those raw-meat sandwiches makes you look like a wild animal.

I don't know about you, but I fear a generation without table manners. I feel as if I'm on a treadmill. I'm exhausted. A growing number of parents agree. This year some Minneapolis suburbanites founded Family Life 1st to call for limits on extracurricular activities (you can visit the group's website at Life1st.org . Says the group's organizer Bill Doherty: "The problem is consumerism--overscheduling our kids because we think of them as products to develop."

When I expected researcher Hofferth to commiserate, however, I was wrong. "There's no evidence that the decline in free time is bad," she said gently. In fact, she added, taking part in sports improves kids' academic test scores and reduces behavior problems. This view bucked conventional wisdom (i.e., mine), so I sought a second opinion. But Marion O'Brien, who teaches human development at the University of Kansas, concurred with Hofferth, saying, "If children enjoy lessons and activities, they gain skills and confidence."

So the solution is not to cancel all car pools and revert to the long, lazy days of my childhood--which, now that I think of it, consisted of my whining about being bored, then sprinkling sugar across the front stoop to create an ant farm--and then begging my mother to let me out of my room while promising never to unleash another insect plague.

Instead, why not schedule family time just as you do ballet lessons? Let the kids help make the choices by, for example, selecting one sport for each season. "Of course, they can't totally have the say," O'Brien warned, "or else no child would ever learn to play the piano." By the way, if this loosens up your Tuesdays, I could really use some help with the car pool.

You can e-mail Michelle at mslat@well.com