Tom Marton and Danit Ben-Ari of Brookline, Mass., have a cunning strategy for successful child rearing. Like most other parents, they wouldn't mind if their two daughters turned out to be among the next Mozarts or Martha Grahams or Mia Hamms. But essentially, they just want to help the girls get the most out of their lives. The key, they've decided, is the weekends, when they see to it that their daughters do...pretty much nothing at all.
Actually, "nothing at all" isn't quite accurate. If the girls, ages 4 and 7, want to sleep late, they do--as do Mom and Dad. After that, there's time for a family breakfast and a lazy morning and an afternoon of outside play or a museum trip or whatever else strikes the family's fancy. Monday, they all know, will come soon enough, and the girls will be going back to the high-stakes race of schoolwork and homework and ballet or chess or soccer practice. But until then, they are going to have a chance to breathe. "My children," Ben-Ari insists, "will have all the time they need simply to hang out and be children."
There was a time when kids being kids wasn't a radical notion. For generations, childhood may have been life's one, true sweetheart deal: go to school six hours a day, take up hobbies or sports to keep your mind and body active, and the rest of the time you play. If along the way you turned out to have some remarkable talent or unexpected gift, fine. But that wasn't one of the job requirements.
In the past few years, however, all that has changed. At the dawn of the 21st century, a curious--and unsettling--transformation has come over American kids. The marvelously anarchic institution of childhood has been slowly turning into little more than an apprentice adulthood. Toddlers who once would have been years away from starting their formal education are being hothoused in nursery schools. Preschoolers who would have spent their time learning simply to play and share are being bombarded with flash cards, educational CD-ROMS and other gadgets designed to teach reading, writing and even second languages. Grade-schoolers are spending longer hours at school, still longer ones sweating over homework and filling what time they have left with a buffet line of outside activities that may or may not build character but definitely build resumes. Kids who once had childhoods now have curriculums; kids who ought to move with the lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee.
The engine behind this early striving is, often, the parents, who are increasingly consumed by the idea that if they can't perfect their children, they must at least get them as close to that ideal as possible. And who can blame them? Birth rates, while short of baby-boom levels, are nonetheless robust, tightening the competition for spots in the best schools. At the same time, almost all those schools have democratized their admissions policies, meaning it's no longer just the elite who can attend. With competition getting ever keener, kids have to do ever more to distinguish themselves.