By Brooke De Lench,
Editor-in-Chief, MomsTeam.com
Raising
sports active kids is difficult, perhaps never more so than today.
Parents feel pressure to help their kids succeed and to keep up with
other parents in an increasingly winner-take-all society. Too often,
parents feel that if they don't do everything for their child, they are
bad parents. Some parents seem to take pride in how busy and stressed
are their lives and those of their kids, as if it is a measure of how
successful they are and how successful they must be as parents.
Research
shows that parents intuitively know how to balance their child's
development. Yet more and more parents seem to be ignoring their own
intuition by over-scheduling and over-stressing their child.
A
University of Michigan study showed that only 30 percent of the days of
school-age youngsters are "free" time, to use as they wish. The other
70 percent is packed with classes, part-time jobs after school,
homework, and extracurricular activities, like sports. Structured
sports time doubled between 1981 and 1997. At the same time,
unstructured outdoor activities declined 50 percent.
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