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Hear what the Hanley's daily schedule is like

Opinions on young children's busy schedules mixed

Jason Dutton owns Elite Karate in Chippewa Falls, where martial arts classes are taught to groups of children of many ages and ability levels. submitted photo

Alexis and Kayla Hanley, ages 6 and 8, wake up every weekday morning at 6:20 a.m. The girls’ mother loads them into the car to go to school an hour later. They’re back home by about 3 p.m. to grab a quick snack and start practicing basketball drills in the basement of their rural Chippewa Falls home.

The day is not even close to being done.

From there, the girls must squeeze in a quick dinner, and then jump back in the car by 5:30 p.m. for a long drive to karate lessons at a studio in downtown Chippewa Falls.

And homework – that comes later. The family gets home from karate around 8 p.m. Then it’s homework time, which pushes the girls’ bedtime close to midnight on some occasions, said their mother, Rene Hanley.

“When school starts in the fall I feel like ‘Here we go again on the treadmill of life,” she said.

The Hanleys’ busy schedule is not unique. In fact, it is becoming close to the norm. Young children are spending more and more time away from home in organized activities, and the consequences of organized activities impacts not only them, but also their parents. Meanwhile, opinions on the positive and negative aspects of scheduling a child into many activities are mixed; some parents and children accept busy schedules, while researchers and educators have concerns.

A second family

Caleb Kostick, an eighth-grader from Hudson, started playing youth hockey when he was 6 years old.

“My dad was taking my older brother to get hockey stuff,” he said. “I wondered where they were taking him, and I just got gear too and started playing.”

While it might seem a bit young age to start playing a sport, Caleb started playing hockey at a typical age by today’s standards, said his mother, Laurie Kostick.

“At 3 or 4 years old they’re in the learn-to-skate (programs),” she said. “The average age to start is now 5 to 6 years old. If you don’t start out at that age you’re playing catch-up.”

Caleb now spends his nights practicing and competing with the Hudson Raiders, a youth hockey team. On average, he said he spends about 10 to 12 hours per week playing hockey.

A study by William J. Doherty, a professor in the department of family social science at the University of Minnesota, shows that children like Caleb are spending a greater amount of time in “structured sports.” The study, “ Overscheduled Kids, Underconnected Families: the Research Evidence,” reports that on average, children are spending about twice as much time per week in sports than they were in the early 1980s. Today the average time spent in sports is a little more than five hours per week.

Even in his down time, Caleb is often with his teammates. Most of his friends are on the hockey team, and while some go to his middle school, there are still friends who he would not regularly see without hockey.

“I’m always trying to figure out schedules with (my best friend) because he has a lot of work from his school,” he said.

Despite the major time commitment, both Caleb and his mother do not see a major problem with his involvement in youth hockey.

Four hours are left open every day for homework and down time, which is enough, Caleb said.

His mother agreed. “He still has time to be a kid,” she said.

Time for parents to be grown-ups

Increasingly busy schedules not only affect children, but also their parents.

While Laurie Kostick said she believes hockey is teaching her son valuable lessons such as good sportsmanship and teamwork, she said the obligation does take time away from other activities she could be doing.

“I don’t know how many hours it winds up being, but I’m in the car at least five out of seven days a week,” she said.

In addition to the daily grind of getting Caleb to practices, his mother also gives up a few weekends during hockey season to be with him when his team hits the road for tournaments. This weekend the pair will travel to St. Cloud, Minn.

Laurie Kostick said she or her husband usually go to most tournaments. Sometimes one of them must stay home to help at the activities their 16-year-old son Kyle participates in.

“We usually just have to divide and conquer,” she said.

Scott Collum of Chippewa Falls said his daughter Hailey’s weekly routine doesn’t impact how he spends his time; he still finds time to participate in the activities he enjoys.

“My life hasn’t changed a bit,” he said. “I still go hunting and fishing.”

Rene Hanley also gives up some of her free time to get her daughters to and from activities. However, as a teacher, she said the downtime she has while she waits for a karate lesson or basketball camp to end is helpful. She said she usually brings her “homework” along.

“I have a stack of about 500 papers that I could be correcting at any given moment,” she joked.

The structure her daughters’ schedules gives their family is something that they’ve all gotten used to, Rene Hanley said.

A structured life

Doherty’s research reports that on average, children lost about 12 hours of free time per week between 1981 and 1997. In addition to a loss of free time, children also are experiencing a decline in play time. The study reports children have lost an average of three hours of play time per week.

Michelle Robinson, principal of Discovery Elementary School in Buffalo, Minn., said the structure that many of today’s children are experiencing is alarming because the lack of free time lessens the opportunities children have to be creative and take part in imaginative play.

For example, she said, if children are allowed time to play they can learn important skills such as social interaction and feeding off of others ideas.

“If you have a group of kids who go outside and want to make a snowman, they might decide, ‘Hey! Let’s make a snow dog instead!’ They can go from one activity to another and let it naturally evolve,” Robinson said.

Structured activities, even if they are activities that are typically considered creative, don’t always allow for natural creativity, she said.

“If you go to painting class, you just paint,” she said.

Robinson also questions whether scheduling children in a number of activities is a beneficial way to teach time management.

“Children that age don’t need to learn time management,” she said. “They don’t schedule when their piano lesson will be. It’s the parents doing the scheduling.”

Collum said scheduling activities ultimately is his daughter’s decision.

“They love it all, but there’s only so much time,” he said. “There’s been many times where more than one activity is on a Thursday or a Friday, and then she has to pick and choose.”

Collum added that his daughter tends to be the one putting the pressure on to do more.

“We’ve tried saying, ‘If you only want to go to karate one night a week that is your choice. You have to be a kid,” he said. “But (children) want it more than anybody else. If they can’t come four nights a week (to karate), they’re disappointed.”

Hanley agreed. She said doing activities such as nightly basketball drills are what her daughters want to do, and that it’s their decision what to do or not do.

“We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think it was a positive thing,” she said.

Finding time for family

Some activities allow the entire family to play or work together. For example, Jason Dutton, owner of Elite Karate in Chippewa Falls, said he he sees many families at his studio.

“We have mothers and fathers who go with sons and daughters,” he said. “We really have a lot of families who come.”

Other families, such as the Kostick’s find time to spend together while at their children’s organized activities.

Some families make it a point to schedule in family time.

Sandy Ricci of Chippewa Falls began to make a conscious effort to make sure her family eats dinner together, when her sons Jake, 15, and Kevin, 13, began to get heavily involved in activities such as sports, Boy Scouts and religious instruction.

“We always try to have supper together. Sometimes it’s really late and sometimes it’s really early,” she said. “But to me, that family time is something that’s really important.”