Burning Out at Nine?

Steven Guzman is only 12, but he’s booked solid. He wakes up at 6 every weekday morning, downs a five-minute breakfast, reports to school at 7:50, returns home at 3:15, hits the books from 5 to 9 (with a break for dinner) and goes to sleep at 10:30. Saturdays are little better: from 9 to 5 he attends a prep program in the hope of getting a scholarship to a private school. Then there are piano lessons and a couple of hours of practice a week. If he’s lucky, he’ll squeeze in his friends on Sunday. “Sometimes I think, like, since I’m a kid, I need to enjoy my life,” he says. “But I don’t have time for that.”

Remember when enjoying life seemed like the point of childhood? Hah! Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research compiled the 1997 time diaries of 3,586 children nationwide, ages 12 and under. The participants came from virtually every ethnic background and all kinds of households–rich, poor, single parent, dual income. But funnily enough, they all sounded a little like Steven.

On average, kids ages 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more than they did in 1981, when a similar study was conducted. They also did more household chores, accompanied their parents on more errands and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet. Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children’s leisure time–defined as time left over after sleeping, eating, personal hygiene and attending school or day care–dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%.

“Children are affected by the same time crunch that affects their parents,” says Sandra Hofferth, the sociologist who headed the study. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both dual-income and “male breadwinner” households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers.)

All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. Child experts, usually a divided bunch, agree: fun is good. “Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself,” says T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School who has written a number of books on parenting. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers, but kids ages 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it. Brazelton warns, “If we don’t pay attention to this, we’re going to create obsessive-compulsive people.”

The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly diminishing “free time” watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. Kids watched TV for an average of an hour and a half each weekday, the study found, a 25% decline since 1981. The drop parallels the Nielsen ratings, which show that TV viewership by kids ages 2 to 11 has reached its lowest level since the mid-’70s.

But if they’re spending less time in front of the TV set, kids aren’t replacing it with reading. Despite the campaigning by parents, teachers and Hillary Clinton to get kids more interested in books, the children surveyed spent just over an hour a week reading, little changed from 1981. Let’s face it, who’s got the time?

–By Nadya Labi