University of Michigan News Service – UM News

ANN ARBOR—As the school year draws to a close and the pace of activities quickens for millions of American children and their road-weary parents, who’s driving whom? Are parents pushing their children to participate in a growing number of activities, or are the kids themselves setting the frenetic pace of contemporary family life?

“The parents we studied weren’t pushing their children to be involved, or over-scheduling them against their wishes,” says Janet Dunn, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic survey and research organization. “It was the children, for the most part, who asked their parents if they could be involved, after hearing about activities at school or from friends.”

For the study, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and scheduled for presentation May 10 in Atlanta, Dunn and colleagues at the ISR Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life conducted an in-depth study of 23 middle-class, mostly two-parent families in a small Midwestern town. Dunn interviewed at least one of the parents and one of their children between the ages of 9 and 12, and also spent time observing both the children and their parents at school and in the community at large. In most of the two-parent families, both parents were employed outside the home, and in one-third of these families, both mother and father worked full time. All of the single mothers in the study worked at least full time as well.

While a few of the children interviewed were involved in just one or two extracurricular activities, most of them participated in several, including Girl or Boy Scouts, after-school sports and music programs, religious education classes, the school safety program, and private swimming, dance, gymnastics, Karate, music or art lessons.

“Except for religious education classes, which few children relished, the children overwhelmingly said that they enjoyed their activities,” Dunn reports. “Further, they generally reported that when they were engaged in a particular activity, they wanted to do that activity and nothing else.”

While the immediate rewards of participation are the major focus of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade children, Dunn found that busy parents say yes to these activity requests for reasons beyond the obvious wish to please their kids and help them have fun. “Parents believe that children’s involvement in any activity has an array of long-term benefits,” she says. “These include developing a suite of skills that parents feel are best learned outside the home, including the development of social skills, discipline, and a sense of responsibility and of teamwork.”

Some parents also used after-school activities to identify the types of activities their children were good at, or to reinforce and expand emerging talents and abilities, Dunn found. “Though conscious of never wanting to push their children into activities that did not interest them, parents nonetheless encouraged and supported children’s participation. Most believe that involvement in any activity is better for children than just sitting around and watching television.”

This “ideology of involvement” is supported and reinforced by teachers, who also place a high value on children’s extra-curricular activities. It also applies to the parents themselves, Dunn found. In addition to driving children to activities, parents felt that their responsibilities included being present at games, performances and award ceremonies and serving as leaders, coaches and organizers.

“Parents support children’s participation in after-school activities not only because they perceive that these activities are good for their children,” Dunn says, “but because they themselves subscribe to an unspoken ideology of involvement exemplified in their own participation in activities outside the home.” Seeing their parents staying so involved and busy in turn reinforces this behavior among the children.

While the situation may be different in rural and urban areas and among upper- or lower-class families, Dunn’s findings suggest that for suburban middle-class Midwestern families, at least, the time crunch seems here to stay because both children and parents want it that way.

Dunn’s collaborators include David A. Kinney of Central Michigan University and Sandra L. Hofferth at the University of Maryland.

The world’s largest academic survey and researchorganization, the University of Michigan Institute forSocial Research (ISR) was established in 1948. Aleader in the development and application of socialscience methodology, ISR conducts some of the mostwidely-cited studies in the nation. These include theSurvey ofConsumer Attitudes, National ElectionStudies, the Monitoring theFuture Study, the Panel Studyof Income Dynamics, the Health andRetirement Study, the ColumbiaCounty Longitudinal Study, and the NationalSurvey of Black Americans. ISR researchers alsocollaborate with social scientists in more than 60nations on the World ValuesSurveys and other projects, and the Institute hasformal ties with universities in Poland, China, andSouth Africa.