The Child Worshipers, I: overscheduled children « Quomodocumque

by JSE

“…a manufacter of stationery supplies saw nothing but sound business recently in bringing forth an appointment calendar designed exclusively for children. It came bound in pink for girls, blue (navy) for boys; bore, just after the frontispiece, a blank page for Telephone Numbers of My Friends; provided outsized space for the hours of every calendar day to accommodate third-grade penmanship, and at last report was, as the trade has it, moving nicely.

Of course it was; it filled a genuine need. How else is one to keep track of the after-school dates, the birthday parties, the bowling parties… And the club meetings? And the benumbing roster of appointments in pursuit of gracious living: the guitar, piano, and recorder lessons…the language lessons, the art lessons, the judo lessons, and, in season, the swimming, riding, skiing, and tennis lessons? When one recalls that this social lion must also fit in his pediatrician, his orthodontist, his allergist, and, alas, not too rarely, his psychiatrist, the wonder is that he ever got along without an address book at all.”

“It has been suggested that what this superbly organized child needs more than anything else is time — time to sit alone under the apple tree and simply muse. The question is: does he know how to sit alone and muse? And would he want to, even if he did? There still may be children around who putter in happy solitude with empty coffee cans or, in their livelier moments, crouch with the neighborhood aficionados over a smashing good game of marbles, but life’s heady pace has broken most tykes of such quaint preoccupations…”

, which I feel quite privileged to have gotten for 50 cents at the Shakespeare’s Books moving sale last Saturday. I suppose one knows abstractly that despairing New York Times Magazine pieces about the plight of today’s upper-middle-class child don’t change that much from decade to decade — but it’s really quite startling to read passages written almost 45 years ago that also appear, more or less unchanged, in this year’s papers:

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