How Overscheduling Prevents Skill Development

The parents I encounter every day in my family therapy practice are caring, conscientious, and thoughtful. They want to protect their children from negative experiences and to provide all the resources available for them to be happy. These are admirable qualities. The challenge is knowing how much assistance is enough and how much is too much, particularly as it relates to a child’s schedule.

Most parents know when their kids' schedules are too full, but there is a lot of pressure on parents to make sure their kids don’t miss out on anything important. Parents often feel like they have to do everything right, which is a lot of pressure. The combination of the pressure to keep their kids ahead of the pack and the abundance of enrichment opportunities available makes it so difficult to resist the pull to overschedule them.

I see two consequences to the overscheduled phenomenon. First, children and teens regularly communicate to me that they are stressed out and need time off. They often say that they have no time to “chill” or “veg out.” They say that even when they try to relax, their parents ask them whether they should be doing homework or practicing music or their sport instead. Their parents often criticize their methods of relaxing, which are most often video games, the internet, or catching up with social media. This makes them feel guilty or defensive, which defeats the purpose of having some time off.

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The second consequence of being overscheduled is that many kids and teens haven’t learned how to fill time on their own, so they expect their parents to continuously structure their schedule. If there is a day with some unstructured time, they bombard their parents with questions about what they will do for the day. They talk about being bored but have very few ideas about how to entertain themselves. Some parents describe their children as needing their attention all the time.

Of course, there are some children who do not like to have downtime. They prefer to be busy and keep a full schedule of activities. This wouldn’t be a problem if they filled their time themselves; it is the dependence on an adult to structure their time that is not adaptive. What many parents don’t realize is the essential and valuable experiences children get when they have unstructured time to themselves. When adults provide the structure for their schedule, children have no need to make decisions about how to plan their day, solve a novel problem, manage their time, prioritize their activities, and so on.

Furthermore, when adults are there to guide their daily activities it takes away the opportunity children have to make a mistake, and, therefore, their opportunity to figure out a solution and learn from it. With a little less structure, a child can learn to tolerate unexpected changes in their plans, which can be an invaluable lesson. A child may have some expectation about the way their ideal free time will take shape but many times it doesn’t go as planned. This requires flexibility, problem-solving, resilience, and frustration tolerance. All skills we definitely want our children to develop. When kids are over-scheduled they miss out on opportunities to build these essential skills.

As a psychologist, I have never worked with a young adult who was struggling in life because they didn’t play enough sports, learn to play a musical instrument, or speak multiple languages. However, what I often discover is that the person never learned how to tolerate unexpected changes, develop the confidence to solve problems on their own, or communicate with people they disagree with. Their parents wonder why they aren’t taking on more responsibility and being more independent. The answer is simple: they seldom had the opportunity to practice doing for themselves as a child. So, if the opportunity arises, give your children the gift of determining part of their own schedule. It could result in opportunities to build critical skills needed later in adolescence and young adulthood.