Over-Scheduling and the Impact on Children with Anxiety

In an effort to prepare their children for success as adults, parents are often over-scheduling them from the time they are toddlers until they graduate from high school.  Children no longer have the opportunity to play with imaginary friends, draw pictures, dream, pretend and just have free time to be alone with their own thoughts and emotions.  What parents do not realize is that this type of mentality and lifestyle can produce anxiety in children.

Years ago, children may have taken music lessons and attended scout meetings, but that was about all.  The rest of their time was spent playing at home with their siblings or playing with the kids that lived on their street.  There was plenty of time to be creative and build a playhouse or play cowboys and Indians.

The biggest mistake that is being made today is that children are constantly involved in adult-supervised activities where their only option is to do what others tell them.  This leaves them no time to learn to think critically on their own, work out their differences, to become self-reliant and to learn to satisfy their natural curiosity.  Adults have forgotten the importance of children playing and just being children.

For a child to be able to run across the field with a dog and fall down in the grass while the dog licks his neck is NOT just wasted time.  Children need time to be free and just be themselves.  In many families, picnics, going to the neighborhood swimming pool, and just playing have long been forgotten.  Could this be why doctors are seeing more children with anxiety than ever before?

Newsforparents.org says, “self-initiated, unstructured creative play is the single most important activity that young children can engage in to develop at all developmental levels, including neurological and cognitive growth.”  Parents who are denying their children this type of play are actually unknowingly creating and perpetuating child anxiety.  Without realizing it, they are also creating children who are unable to function correctly as adults, despite their hearts being in the right place.

Over-scheduling children with extra-curricular activities causes unnecessary stress in their young lives.  They are constantly running to and fro from one activity to another, and their body has no time to slow down.  The entire body is placed on alert to meet the stress, but the problem is that the stress invariably continues, and the body and mind has no rest and recovery.

When a child is under constant stress, the body becomes exhausted, the child feels totally overwhelmed, and their immune system is weakened, leaving their body with very little defense.   Is it any wonder that so many children are sick with complicated and devastating illnesses?  They are being pushed into an anxiety filled life that is literally destroying them.

One of the worst things caused by over-scheduling is a lack of family time.  Children are in school most of the day, they spend their time after school and on Saturdays in extra-curricular activities, and then it is time for homework.  Once that is finished, it is bedtime.  There is even less family time if both parents work outside of the home.

The easiest way to tell if a child is over-scheduled is to ask whether or not he spends time daily with his family.  It doesn’t have to be long periods of time either.  It can be parents sitting down with their child and reading a story or playing a game with them or it can be a time of rough housing on the floor. When is the last time YOUR family all ate dinner together?

Parents need to step back at times and listen to what their children are saying about their different activities.  In the beginning they may have been excited about what they were doing, but after a time, they may have grown tired of them, or they may have lost interest.  This is just another sign that they are over-scheduled and that their activities need to be cut back or re-examined.  It is important for the parents to react before they discover that their children are suffering from a childhood anxiety disorder or having panic attacks.

Over-scheduling not only produces anxiety in a child, it causes a whole slew of other problems as well.  They may not be able to sleep at night or have night terrors and they may be experiencing stomach aches, anxiety attacks and headaches, too.  Even though their children are experiencing all of these symptoms, oftentimes these parents think they are doing their children a favor by providing them with so many organized activities, perhaps as a means to distract them from their emotions, which end up compounded the problem!

The worst part of it all is that parents are often convinced that their children enjoy participating in everything they are doing.  However, these children are telling their teachers and doctors that they would rather just have time to play with their toys and their friends.  Many of them are afraid to say anything for fear of disappointing their parents.

According to webmed.com, “too much work and too little play can backfire and lead to depression, anxiety, perfectionism and stress” and it does not produce the well-rounded successful adults that the parents are striving to create.  Instead, this produces anxious children and families that are stressed to the maximum.

Interestingly, these children are the ones who sit around the house complaining to their mothers that they are bored.  They have no idea how to entertain themselves and no stimulation to find something to do.  Instead of producing successful adults, parents are producing children with anxiety problems who as adults cannot enjoy the simple things of life.

Although many parents over-schedule their children with the idea that it will keep them out of trouble when they become teenagers, studies have found that this is not necessarily true.  According to medicinenet.com, when these children reach their teen years they are burned out and often do not want to continue in their extra-curricular activities.  This is especially true of teens that were over-scheduled from the time they were three years old!  Parents suddenly find themselves with teenagers that are totally bored and that have no idea how to entertain themselves in healthy ways and may turn to drugs or sex to fill the void and numb themselves from their bubbling emotions they were always too busy to learn how to cope with.

In order to stop producing anxiety in children, parents need to reconsider what they are doing with their children’s schedules.  It is time to drastically cut back on extracurricular activities and stop robbing children of their childhood.  Parents need to allow their children to just be children.

If you suspect your child may be suffering from anxiety, click below to learn more about what you can do to help:

Click here to learn more about your child’s anxiety and what you can do to help