Parents are spending with abandon to provide the right education, material goods and character-building experiences. In her book, “Buy, Buy Baby,” author Susan Gregory Thomas says Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1976) “overstimulate, overschedule, overshop for, and overobsess about their own children.” Read my interview with her in the previous post.

I try to fight the tide of overscheduling, but my three kids are the ones calling the shots. I don’t enroll them in anything unless they ask. And of course, they ask: The oldest for piano and voice lessons, theater classes, math enrichment and Girl Scouts; the middle one for soccer, basketball, guitar, math enrichment and Brownies; the youngest (age 4), for ballet and tap. (Okay, the older two didn’t ask for math enrichment. That was my idea, a consequence of my inability to explain the concept of elapsed time.

When I grew up in the 1970s, the extracurricular options were after-school sports and the occasional class (including disco dancing lessons taught for $1 by my eighth grade homeroom teacher), or the dozen or so classes offered by the town’s rec center. My mother jokes that she raised my ten siblings and me with “benign neglect.” In the summers we took off on our Banana-seat Schwinn bikes in the morning and came home when the streetlights went on. We never did worksheets to keep our academic skills fresh (I don’t make my kids do them either).

Today there is no end to the possibilities for the middle-class parent to enrich their children. We buy in, schedule, chauffeur, and think (or at least I do) that there’s so much more we could be doing with the time spent in traffic. (I cart my laptop everywhere.) Why, both practically and philosophically, are parents doing these things to and for their kids? What are they striving for? A few possible theories:

It’s all about self-actualization. Many of today’s parents were raised with the message of empowerment, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Anthony Robbins urging people to pursue their passion, the U.S. Army recruiting jingle “Be all that you can be.” We want our kids to find themselves, express their gifts, be happy, be a blessing to other people. And there’s no denying the real benefits of certain activities: Playing piano is positively correlated with math skills; participation in sports with higher self-confidence, team-building skills, and a lower likelihood of experimenting with drugs.

It’s all about economic survival. We are anxious about our children’s futures in a world where domestic and global competition is an economic reality. How many parents joke, half seriously, that they wouldn’t have been qualified for admission to their college alma maters today? How many of us in our late 30s and 40s see colleagues who have been out of work two years or more, as their jobs went overseas?  -ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in July (subscription required), Brink Lindsey of the Libertarian Cato Institute noted that the wage premium associated with a college degree has jumped to 70 percent in recent years from about 30 percent in 1980; and the graduate degree premium has soared to more than 100 percent from 50 percent. “Meanwhile, dropping out of high school now all but guarantees socioeconomic failure,” Lindsey says. (Lindsey’s piece, which looks at the income gap, places the responsibility for financial success squarely on the individual, his parents and cultural values; see this link – subscription required — for rebuttals from WSJ readers.)

We are anxious about our kids’ future in a world where employer loyalty, generous retirement benefits and affordable health care are disappearing. How many of us have reinvented ourselves (often happily) as entrepreneurs, because our employers were more concerned about satisfying Wall Street’s quarterly earnings expectations (and rewarding millions to the people at the very top) than building a strong future through committed employees? How many of us know colleagues in their 50s who have worked for the same company for years, and received pink slips just months shy of becoming eligible for retirement benefits?

It’s all about keeping up with the Joneses. When you see all of your neighbors investing the time and money in enrichment classes, you worry about denying your child a leg-up. For instance, Lindsay cites the work of sociologist Annette Lareau, who suggests working-class parents still follow the traditional, laissez-faire child-rearing approach that she calls “the accomplishment of natural growth.” But at the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, Lindsey writes, “parents now engage in what (Lareau) refers to as ‘concerted cultivation’  — intensely overseeing kids’ schoolwork and stuffing their afternoon hours and weekends with organized enrichment activities.

“This new kind of family life is hectic and stressful, but it inculcates in children the intellectual, organizational and networking skills needed to thrive in today’s knowledge-based economy. In other words, it makes unprecedented, heavy investments in developing children’s human capital.”

So what’s the problem? Overstimulation can backfire. Researchers say enrolling kids in too many programmed activities can actually hinder their creativity and lead to stress disorders. The kids don’t have the downtime to dream; they don’t get the time or space to figure things out for themselves; they may develop an enormous sense of entitlement which will hurt them later in the workforce; and the time constraints divide families, making it nearly impossible to just enjoy each other. Meanwhile, parents spend to their own detriment – living way beyond their means, leaving themselves unprepared for retirement. They ultimately risk becoming a burden on the children they wanted so badly to launch to a life of freedom and opportunities.

Have you found yourself going to extremes to cultivate your children, or got fed up and decided to opt out of the enrichment-industrial complex? How do you balance “developing human capital” with both time and financial constraints? Are these choices really enriching our kids or just diminishing our family budgets? I’d love to hear your stories.

• Overheard at the Diner
• Kids and Spending
• New-School-Year Resolutions
• Life, Death and Money
• Spend More in Retirement? Or less?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:29 am and is filed under Money & Happiness, comparing/competing, money and kids, money anxiety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.