Time Crunch on Children

On average, American kids ages 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, 8 hours more than they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet. Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children's leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%.

"Children are affected by the same time crunch that affects their parents," says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children's timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double income and "male breadwinner" households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers).

All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. "Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself," says T. Berry Brazelton, professor at Harvard Medical School. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers, but kids ages 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it.

The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing "free time" watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they're spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren't replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spent just over an hour a week reading. Let's face it, who's got the time?