Back to baby basics

Parks filled with children playing idly. Homework within limits and prohibited on holidays so as not to be overbearing. Mothers less inclined to shuttle their children to an endless roster of programs.

There is evidence -- in the parks, the play-dates, the homework schedules and even Hollywood magazines -- that the end is at least near for the pattern of modern parenting that has in recent years dictated highly scheduled lives for children and spawned the species described as helicopter parents.

It can be found in the stories of mothers at playgrounds and schools, who no longer spend so much of their days scurrying their children from one activity to another; in the experiences of parents who successfully lobbied Canada's largest school board to introduce a radical policy that bans homework on holidays and sets limits for work; in the shelves of the nation's bookstores, no longer filled with sprawling racks of angst-filled tomes about how to make a better baby, but smaller now and more likely devoted to simpler topics such as play.

These are baby steps, certainly, but they are nonetheless indicative of a movement whose madness may have reached its peak and moved on to a point approaching sanity.

"I think it went so far that the pendulum is starting to swing back," says Jen Lawrence, a keen chronicler of modern mothering, who recently traded in her popular mommy blogs (Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition and TO Mama) to found the online newsletter BlissNotes. com. She is a former Toronto banker and a mother of two, and she first noticed the shift in parks and play-dates.

"The parks are really full now, and they weren't so much before. And when I'm arranging after-school play-dates, people are available," she says, remembering how not so long ago such arrangements involved serious maternal day-timer consultations to work around a child's over-scheduled existence.

Small things, yet significant indicators of change. Ms. Lawrence's oldest daughter is not yet five, and still she has come through a seismic shift in parenting culture.

Whether it is called hyper-parenting or over-parenting, the micromanaged child or the over-scheduled child, it means the same thing: a generation of children signed up in utero for the right preschool; primed for early brain development with Baby Einstein and the like; embarked on a scheduled life in babyhood with play groups in French immersion, kindergym and infant music sessions; enrolled in tutoring by the age of three; every school day book-ended with a loaded program of scheduled activities and organized games.

It has been more than 25 years since The Hurried Child first raised the alarm about this style of parenting, but if book titles are an indicator, it reached its zenith in the past few years: Worried All the Time: Over-parenting in an Age of Anxiety; The Over-Scheduled Child; The Hyper-Parenting Trap; Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

That is changing. The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy became a sensation and a popular catch-phrase in Britain last year, and a televised series called May Contain Nuts poked fun at the hilarity that ensues from competitive parenting.

Andi Buchanan, the Philadelphia author of Mother Shock and other parenting books and, most recently, The Daring Book for Girls, says she has noticed a trend "towards emphasizing the 'slacker mom' -- embracing the slow lane, as it were," in parenting writing, particularly blogging.

"I think it's almost a self-correcting thing: We've been pushed for so long to do more and give more and be perfect -- and judged more along the way throughout the process -- that it makes sense to me that many women are reacting to it by figuring their own way or returning to the less high-pressured experience of their own childhoods, or rather, their idyllic childhoods."

The trend is evident in the parenting books sections of Indigo and Chapters stores across the country, which are carrying fewer books on those shelves than they did five years ago, but sales in parenting titles are growing. "We find that we sell more copies of fewer books than in the past," said Janet Eger, the company's director of public relations, who said some of the parenting staples, What to Expect When You're Expecting, Kids Are Worth It, remain top sellers.

Ann Douglas, whose Mother of All Parenting books series is among those perennial favourites, says she too has noticed a shift: "Hyper-competitive parenting is definitely on the wane," she says. "Instead of seeing one another as 'the enemy' -- the mind set that develops when parents are pitted against one another by impossible parenting standards -- parents are once again seeing one another as allies."

She likens the atmosphere to that of grassroots parenting movements of the 1970s and 1980s, with parents now speaking out loudly against school board homework policies and funding cutbacks affecting community pools.

"Who has time to worry about keeping up with the Joneses … when there are so many pressing issues to deal with?" One example of that shift in focus is the new homework policy adopted last month by the Toronto District School Board, which defines parameters for what counts as relevant homework, stipulates grade-appropriate time and bans homework on holidays. The new policy, which has been hailed by parents and drawn interest from schools and parent groups around the world, is a significant shift from the days when the parental push was more inclined towards more drills, more tutoring, more testing and back-to-basics learning.

Ms. Lawrence, the Toronto blogger, says that in addition to the more relaxed school pace, most of the people she knows have scaled back their children's after-school activity schedule too. She only has her daughter enrolled in two activities, one after school and one on the weekend, "and no more of that rushing to Baby Pilates and Baby Feng Shui and all that."

She says some cues can be taken from the coverage of celebrity parenting, or, what she calls "the Britney factor."

Hyper-parenting was at its peak when Ms. Lawrence had her first child, and she remembers all the tabloids and celebrity magazines filled with glossy pictures of perfect-looking mothers, in beautiful nurseries, writing children's books on the side and gushing about parenting as the most satisfying thing 24/7. Now, she says, such airbrushed coverage has been replaced by such stories as Brooke Shields talking about postpartum depression, Angelina Jolie and Madonna and their adoption missteps, and the parenting train wreck of Britney Spears.

"Compared to the cult of parenting perfection that was being peddled," she says, "there is a lot less to live up to now."

The pages to color would be something like color something based on the answer to a math problem.

My son was good at math, but hated to color. He actually didn’t mind the math portion, but it was torture to get him to color after he had done 30 math problems.

The coloring didn’t even have anything to do with math.

Oh, my 8th grader gets less homework than his 5th grade sisters. He can handle having homework. His sisters can’t.

He’s given time in class to finish most of his work. There’s been a few days he’s had a lot of homework, but it’s really inconsistent.

I don’t really mind homework for the middle schoolers and the high schoolers. For one thing, they are old enough to stay at home by themselves and do the work by themselves. They can do their homework while I go to the grocery store or when I run errands.

With the little kids, we are all stuck at home doing homework.

I would only consider homeschooling for my special needs daughter. My other 2 like all the activity at school. My other daughter actually hates the summer because it is not busy enough for her.

I’m also looking at some charter schools that do things differently than the other public schools or private schools in the area. I’ve only read about them on the internet, and I haven’t actually visited them. They are more project based and self paced schools. They sound interesting, but I need to actually see the schools.

I do like that we are starting to see options in schooling. I think every kid is different, and it’s wonderful to start seeing options.

I never remember having homework in grade school. I had so little home work in high school, I did it in study hall and never brought a book home in four years. These were college-prep classes in the ‘80s. Still aced SAT’s and graduated top 10 and got into every college I tried for. This trend towards excessive homework is ridiculous and wasteful. It is because the teachers are lazy and vindictive.

Geepers! I’m jealous...I grew up in North Andover in the ‘80s, and had at least 2 hrs a night in elementary school, up to at least 4 in High School...had a great SAT score but wound up at the University of Georgia anyway. I was ready to trade it in for a social life. ;) Oh well, in my career I worked next to Harvard and RISD grads who were in way more debt than I ever was...

You should make your kids do their homework. Or do you mean the school is sending homework home for the parents as well?

(I do understand your point and am poking fun)

PS - The fact that you complain about the amount of homework proves you are involved enough in your children’s education to know what they are working on and helping them with it. It is more than a lot of parents do.

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