Dear Parents...

Dear Parents... (not MY parents, but the parents of all those teens and tweens running around this country):

Remember how from the 1970's and into the early 1990's women were sold the line that you can have it all? Career. Husband. Kids. Friends. Hobbies. Showcase home. Somewhere in there it went from can have it all to must have it all.

And then sometime in the mid-1990's as I recall, more and more of my friends started hopping off of the career ladder and into full time wife and mom status. We got burned out. We realized that we were holding many titles and delegating most of our duties, including the most sacred... taking care of our husbands and kids and homes.

We came to peace with the fact that we couldn't have it all because we couldn't do it all. Having our lives spread a mile wide and an inch deep stinked, stank, stunk.

Remember that?

OK...

We're doing the same thing to our kids. Here's an excerpt from an article we ran in the first issue of our school magazine. It describes the typical day of an average middle or high school student.

Today’s youth are under unprecedented stress due to the
intensity of their school assignments, extracurricular activities
and social lives. The typical [****] high school student wakes
up at 5:30 a.m. Those who choose to take zero hour classes and
those who participate in morning practices with the marching
band or workouts with sports teams arrive at school in time for a
7:00 a.m. start. School runs until 3:05 p.m. and athletic practices
go for a minimum of two hours, lasting usually until 5:30 p.m.
Then students head home or to work or to volunteer commitments
or to church or to other practices or lessons. After grabbing a
quick dinner on the run, they start homework, often beginning
their assignments at 10:00 p.m. or later, with hours of work to
complete before going to bed. They wrap up homework (and
Facebook) well after midnight, fall asleep for a few short hours,
and wake early the next morning to do it all over again.

I feel comfortable quoting that information because even though the student got the byline, I actually wrote that paragraph. Why ? After trying and trying to get him to elaborate on the idea of teen stress management, I finally gave up. He couldn't string together anything remotely coherent; he was too tired.

Would you care to guess just how many emails I've gotten complaining that having to study for a test or complete a routine homework assignment is interfering with the time the parents have committed their kids to attend dance class - soccer practice - piano lessons - art lessons - voice lessons - play rehearsals - hunting season - whateverelsesomeonehasfiguredtheycanchargeparentsfor? More than I care to count. Every single time I get a complaint, it is linked to how little time the kids have after school for homework because of extracurricular commitments.

I would guess that about 30% of my middle school students and about 80% of my high school students get five or fewer hours of sleep a night. These kids are 12-18 years old! If a generation of well-educated career women couldn't handle "having it all," what on earth makes us think our kids can?

Moms and dads... step up to the plate and be the grown ups. Let the kids be kids. Give them some white space on their calendars. Let them taste new things... don't let them get eaten alive by those things. What we thought were our fun activities are someone else's business. True story. Some great salesmen have convinced us that our kids have to have outside instruction on how to play and be creative and express themselves. They have brainwashed us into thinking our kids need to be doing something away from home constantly and that we need to pay experts to help them do it. They have built an industry out of parental fear and guilt.

At what price? Our kids are exhausted... burned out. We have no family time anymore. We barely know where are kids are at any given moment, much less WHO they are, deep down... where it counts. Our church youth groups are shrinking at alarming rates. Our family budgets are stretched beyond the limits and our credit cards maxed out because we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for our kids to go to "the next level" in... whatever.

Please... for the love of all that is rational... and good... stop. Be a trendsetter in the opposite direction. Reclaim your freedom. Reclaim your family. Reclaim your life.