Advertisement You worry about not having friends. Then there are those heinous middle school years, when everything is awkward.
Along the way you can suffer the scorn of your peers, the realization that life isn’t fair, and you get acne on top of it all.
There’s the push to get good grades, stay active in extracurricular activities, aim for a good college, and then go on to be a brilliant (insert high-paying profession here).
These days things are even tougher.
Expectations are higher, colleges more expensive and the number of extracurricular activities has exceeded the people served by McDonald’s.
Parents, schools, friends and even the federal government set standards unthinkable when I was in knickers. Be more, do more, reach higher, farther, wider. “Just do it.”
Are we pushing too much? How active do kids really have to be, and how much is too much?
My friend Deb White said the pushing isn’t coming from her. She has three active kids, and her son Aaron, 15, is a good friend of mine.
“It’s so different for every kid,” Deb said. “We have to limit Aaron’s intake because sometimes he has a heart of gold, but he wants to do for everyone.”
That includes theater, working a full-time babysitting job, studying voice with a professor from Viterbo University, maintaining good grades, and placing first at state vocal competitions two years in a row. Aaron told me he does it to stay busy, out of trouble and because he’s passionate about what he chooses.
“I also do it because it’s going to look good on my college application,” he said, “and I always think about my post-secondary education. It’s the main thing on my mind.”
He also sleeps five hours a night to get it all done.
For Deb quality is more important than quantity, so she limits what Aaron does. She also has to pace herself. “I’ve learned to compensate because these mean a lot to him,” she said. “Deep within every child they know what their passions are.”
Kip Zirkel, supervising psychologist at the Family and Children’s Center in La Crosse, said there’s a reason we’re the most medicated society per capita.
“We increasingly define ourselves by our successes. It’s so ingrained in our society we can’t get away from it,” Zirkel said.
Gone are the days of sandlot baseball, he said, where kids learned how to negotiate and become self-sufficient. Now things are so structured they have no down time.
So, more sandlot and less emphasis on SAT scores? Maybe. But maybe Deb’s right. It’s about knowing the children and what they can handle.
Good luck helping them manage it all.
Ryan Stotts can be reached at (608) 791-8446 or ryan.stotts@lee.net.
