New light on the overscheduled child controversy: evidence on children's activities and children's outcomes from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

Abstract

Middle-class parents, claim Rosenfeld and Wise, engage in hyper-parenting - making themselves what has been called 'crazybusy' trying to give their child every possible advantage in life. According to this view, parents fill up their child's lives with a hectic schedule of 'enrichment activities', starting in the early preschool years, all in an effort to help them gain admittance to a top-ranked schools and achieve the highest university entry scores. The result is 'overscheduled' children that have too little 'down time'. Opponents of these ideas argue that children who engage in these activities do better on most measures than children who are do not participate in these activities. Using data from the 4-5 year cohort of the first wave of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) this paper examines these claims and counterclaims in a two-step process. First, it describes how much time children of this age typically spend in scheduled activities and the extent of unstructured free time among these children. Second, it compares the school preparedness and social adjustment of children with differing levels of 'scheduling'.