Education Next – Robert Pondiscio
“Some arguments in education are endlessly recycled. Battles over homework, the best ways to teach math, school discipline, and other hot-button issues wax and wane, but they never go away or get resolved. One of these hardy perennials is in full flower again: the myth of the overstressed child. The New York Times‘s normally sober columnist Frank Bruni last week pronounced himself filled with sadness over the plight of “today’s exhausted superkids” and their childhoods, which he described as “bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the ‘pressure of perfection.’” He lauded the arrival of a shelf of new and recent books—an “urgently needed body of literature,” in Bruni’s words—collectively arguing that “enough is enough.” There’s already a fairly rich body of literature on the subject, and it paints a very different picture. In 2006, a trio of researchers—Joseph L. Mahoney, Angel L. Harris, and Jacquelynne S. Eccles—published an extensive study based on a nationally representative longitudinal database of five thousand families and their children. The researchers concluded there was “very limited empirical support for the over-scheduling hypothesis.” In fact, the opposite seemed to be true: Participation in organized extracurricular activities is closely related (even when controlled for socioeconomic status) to a broad range of positive outcomes, including children’s physical safety and psychological well-being, supportive relationships with peers and adults, higher self-esteem, reduced alcohol and drug use, and higher high school graduation rates.”(more)