No Time To Be A Kid

The schooners, the waves, the clouds, the flying sea crow, the fragrance of saltmarsh and mud, the horizon's edge. These become part of that child who went forth everyday And who now goes and will always go forth everyday.

Walt Whitman's verse no longer has relevance to our lives. Our time for the soul is lost, surrendered to the phrase "You've Got Mail" or drowned in the raucous lights and music at Chuck E. Cheese. The drive from soccer practice to ballet is not long enough to ponder.

We have no time to think, let alone absorb nature's beauty or play a spontaneous game. There are 2-year-olds to prep for prep school, after all.

Wait a minute. A growing number of psychologists (psyche being Greek for the soul) are warning us to heed a childhood chant: Stop. Look. Listen. Does your 10-year-old really need soccer, hockey, piano and drawing? Maybe not. They warn the price of all these activities may be stressed out, overscheduled kids.

Not only famous children — such as tennis star Jennifer Capriati, who turned pro 24 days before her 14th birthday — suffer this fate. Psychologist Sheila Ribordy treated an 8-year-old who thought his parents had enrolled him in so many activities to avoid spending

time with him. "They definitely had the best of intentions," says Ribordy, director of the clinical psychology training program at DePaul University in Chicago, of the parents.

Why would well-meaning parents cause a child heartache? Because the problem runs deeper than individual parents. Society encourages this overbooking of our kids. "We are going through one of those periods in history, such as the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, when children are the unwilling victims of societal upheaval and change," writes David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.

Our children don't play freeze tag anymore. And they don't ride bikes around the neighborhood like they used to; instead, they go to soccer and ballet and computer camp. The activities themselves are not bad. But often as parents we push our children. Do more. Learn more. Excel more. They go to camp at the expense of spending a Thoreau-like summer in their backyards.

Part of the reason we do this is that the traditional family, which we might equate with homemade sit-down dinners and Sundays in church, has evolved beyond the 1950s. June Cleaver is now a soccer mom. No single image of the modern family — single-parent, divorced, blended, two-income — comes to mind. Except, perhaps, a stressful one.

Since the 1960s, when the family dynamic started changing, society has found itself following two styles of child-rearing: that of Superparent raising Superkid and that of the stressed-out parent bypassing their kid's childhood as a means of lightening the load. Thus, the child who can start dinner can make dinner. Or the child who can put away his clothes can do laundry and so forth.

Further, our so-called latchkey kids face not a demanding parent, but an invisible one. An empty house. Mindless television and video games for company.

Despite the tumultuous cultural change, encouraging statistics have emerged. In this decade, the nation's rates of teenage births, violent juvenile crime and teenage drug use have all declined. However, at the beginning of one of our most narcissistic, consumption-conscious decades, the '80s, Elkind, rather prophetically, noted that our children were in trouble. In the '90s, reality bore out his assertion — in the form of tragedies like Columbine.

We should not be surprised that our children commit adult acts of violence when we have made the mistake of treating them like adults.

Elkind used the simple case of how children spend their summers to illustrate his point that we rush maturity. "The change in the programs of summer camps reflects the new attitude that the years of childhood are not to be frittered away by engaging in activities merely for fun," notes Elkind. "Rather, the years are to be used to perfect skills and abilities that are the same as those of adults."

There's no single face on youth rebellion
By Josh Bluhm
A pallid-faced crowd dressed in black gathers outside Chicago's Metro nightclub, and draws derisive shouts from a passing car. "Hey, where's the funeral?" mocks 26-year-old goth David Birdwell of Chicago. For Birdwell and other goths, such vocal abuse is almost a cliche. Yet, such a casual approach reflects the attitude of alternative groups.
Hip-hop, gangsta, grunge, punk and hippie. The gothic scene is one of myriad youth subcultures that have emerged, or re-emerged, at a stunning pace in recent years. This splintered face of alternative cultures is a result of the electronic age. The explosion in Internet use has inundated youth with information, and given them countless opportunities to experiment with identity In 1999, there's no one face to youth rebellion.
Of course, there's a side to youth subcultures that's timeless. Adolescents have always faced simultaneous and conflicting impulses: to identify with others and assert individualism. The dissension between mainstream society and subcultures, including the goths, sounds as if it comes from 1960s revolutionary Tom Hayden's Justice in the Streets'. "As the misfits of a dying capitalism, we were repressed in unique ways and had to rebel in unique ways."
Though ways to rebel may have evolved, the reasons to participate in subcultures remain a constant. "Youth identify with subcultures because they are looking for a home, looking for the thrill, the risk of being perceived as dangerous," says Beth Doll, an expert on youth development and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Colorado. Young people are going through rebellion and experimentation just as previous generations did, but today's easy access to information widely expands the experiences available to contemporary kids, says Nanette Potee, a professor of intercultural communications at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Such communication barriers as time and space are shattered by technology, and cultural distinctions between geographical areas become more obscure.
Changes in the face of society have given room for the computer to become a powerful influence. Many children have both parents working, says Wheeling High School social worker Tom Scotese. This tends to mean they look more outside the family for identity. What they are discovering for themselves, through the infinite possibilities made available by computers, often defies easy categorization by mainstream society.
"Youth today are more technology oriented, technology driven. As a result, what used to be a huge division between urban and suburban no longer exists," Potee says. "The experience of the kids in the suburbs is, at times, not so different from the kids in the city."
Potee calls the mosaic of youth groups "co-cultures," and Doll says teens may shift from one group to another. Most subcultures are constantly in flux. Lacking any rigid hierarchal structure, subgroups have a tendency to resist definite labels. Any one subgroup may share features of other groups.?
The goth scene is just one of the many subcultures that have grown exponentially as a result of technological advancements. Yet gothic remains a relatively loosely defined concept. "It is difficult to say what is gothic," Bird-well says. "It is not, as portrayed by the media, an organized group with leaders. It is basically artists and creative people who have decided not to follow the masses in letting television and fashion magazines tell them what is hip to wear this month." He adds, "We'd just rather go to the new Jekyll and Hyde club, and laugh at the cheesy B movies and talking skeletons, than go to the ESPNzone."
Springfield Southeast High School teacher Joni Paige says she has noticed that her students are dramatically affected by the media images issuing from electronic sources. She points to the response of her students in the aftermath of the events last spring in Littleton. "Students were just as confused and had just as many questions about the images coming out of Columbine

No time to be a kid

Our children don't play freeze tag anymore. There's no time between baseball and ballet. And the kids are paying the price