Too busy children: all the damage

Try asking a mother the balance of your children's extracurricular activities. He will recite a sort of shopping list to you. Sports activitiesFrom swimming to fencing, from skiing to soccer. Music, theater, dance. A language to learn, outside of the core subjects at school. And so it goes, the more you have, the more you put in. Driven by the pressure of parents gripped by performance anxiety and trapped in the funnel of presentism, overly busy children have worse schedules than they will manage in their careers: there's never a gap to cultivate nothingness, never a break, a respite, a moment of abandonment outside of space and time. And never mind if this massive dose of commitments ends up fueling insecurities and anxiety.

The driving force behind this attitude doesn't come from the children, but from their parents. They want their children to be super-committed to compete in a society of merit, of bloody selection, of escape into an eternal present. And good grades in school aren't enough to build this toolbox; it requires an extra commitment that somehow involves the child's entire life.

I have no expertise to give a firm opinion on this widespread attitude, and I will spare you the amount of research that goes into it. they focus on risks and wasteI'll mention just one, it comes from an English university, it's called Education and Society, and was carried out on a sample of 50 families with children enrolled in schools in the North West of England. 88 percent of the children had extracurricular activities five days a week, which were in addition to homework to do at home, with at least two negative effects: a marked decrease in family time together and a deterioration in parent-child relationships.

Overwhelmed by the amount of commitments imposed by their parents, children grow up with some significant sacrifices. They do not grasp the pleasure and value of boredomAnd by losing this aptitude in childhood, they will have a hard time regaining it in adulthood, confusing idleness and boredom (with their attendant virtues, including creative ones) with indolence and sloth. With these manager parents who treat their children like boxers' trainers in the ring during the breaks between rounds, children risk losing the meaning of childhood. They don't enjoy it, and they absorb all the limitations of adulthood, of a life that loses its carefree nature, too early. Here too, there's a risk of a fracture that lasts over time: the overly busy child will struggle to discover the magic of lightnessFurthermore, the inability to "do nothing" can lead to frustration. Children may begin to feel overwhelmed by the need to always be productive and excel at everything. This can lead to stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem, resulting in difficulty coping with the challenges of daily life.

The lack of free time, as demonstrated by various scientific studies and the wisdom of elders and pediatricians, drags children into the quicksand of electronic prosthetics: social life becomes social, sedentary, with little attention to healthy eating. A child, squeezed and stressed by commitments, usually sleeps little, is more aggressive, and tends to gain weight.

The child overwhelmed by an avalanche of commitments, crushed by a frantic race against time, like his parents, will have more difficulty developing the critical sense, the engine of a growth that requires slow time and not daily stress and haste. The philosopher Umberto Galimberti in an article entitled Winners and unhappy, which I recommend to all parents, writes something important: a busy child is deprived of the most precious time: the time to get to know himself. And in this regard he cites St. Augustine's warning: Volo ut sis. Translated: “I want you to become what you are.” Why stop it?

Read also:

• Helicopter parents and children with no will to fight
• How to raise well-mannered children
• The importance of knowing how to say no to your children