SQUASHED

(Published in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, January 2008)


I read an article in the New York Times recently that parents are encouraging their youngsters to take up the game of squash. Kids as young as 8 years old are enrolling in squash classes. The reason for this is that elite eastern colleges have squash teams, and according to one parent who was interviewed for the article, “it could give my son a leg up on his Harvard application some day.” There are now so many kids playing squash for this reason, yet so few students needed to fill a squash team, that such an effort is doomed from the start, not to mention the misguided nature of the effort.

I’ll tell you that when I read articles like this, I get the feeling that we psychiatrists will never run out of work. When parents are programming their children as tightly as this article suggests, there will be no shortage of neurotic, anxious, and insecure adults in the future to fill our schedules.

It is a failure of awareness of normal childhood development for parents to direct their children to have a primary focus on building a resume rather than enjoying their childhoods. It’s a good way to have a child lose out on much of the spontaneous friendships, fun, and laughter that characterize youthfulness. I am concerned when I learn of parents scheduling their young children for every kind of lesson and activity, leaving no time for “free play”. Optimal childhoods allow time for youngsters to explore the world they live in, become curious about life, and feel carefree.

When you understand that children on average laugh over 300 times a day, while adults laugh fewer than 10 times a day, you have to ask yourself what the rush is to get children out of childhood and acting more like adults. This parenting approach of excessive scheduling of children to be involved in structured activities is called “green housing”--a way to ripen and prematurely age something artificially. Have you ever compared the taste of a tomato ripened in a green house to one ripened naturally on the vine?

Another common childrearing style today is called “helicopter parenting” because these parents hover over their children excessively. These folks do not allow their children to play outdoors unsupervised, do not ever leave their children with baby sitters, do everything for their children (often including their homework), and think of their children in such idealized ways that they cannot accept imperfection in them. If that’s not a breeding ground for neurosis, I don’t know what is.

So much of life is serendipitous and not really under our control. When parents exert such “over control” of their children, either by “green housing” them or by being “helicopter parents”, they interfere with the normal development of a youngster. The only reason to play the game of squash is because a person finds it enjoyable to play. As a resume builder, it’s a loser. And can you imagine the child dragged off to “squash class” at age 8 because the parents have Harvard in mind for that child’s future? All I can imagine coming from such an effort is not the cost of a Harvard education but the cost of the likely future psychotherapy sessions.