JAMAICAN children are increasingly finding themselves with schedules stacked with not only academic classes, but a variety of extra-curricular activities, with piano, tennis, swimming and computer classes topping the priority list of most parents.

But local psychologists have warned parents against this seemingly growing trend, while noting the absolute importance of moderation and balance in a child’s life.

“Extra-curricular activities are important because they add to the children’s reservoir of experience and the multiple tasks they will have later in life. But, like in everything else, balance – meaning that the child takes on just enough – is important,” said Dr Pearnel Bell, who runs a private practice in Montego Bay, St James.

“Children shouldn’t be overtaxed, then, in doing multiple activities because, instead of becoming therapeutic for the children, it becomes stressful as there are too many activities,” she added.

Psychiatrist Dr Wendel Abel also noted the need for balance, while identifying play time as a key component of that.

“It is important to create structure in the life of a child, but you must ensure they have protected free time for play. Play is an important component activity in the life of a child. There should be protected time for play, and protected time for relaxation – as adults do,” Abel, also head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), told the Sunday Observer.

Dr Gillian Lowe, also a psychiatrist with UHWI, reinforced the need for moderation and balance, while emphasising the need for structure.

“Anything in excess is bad, but every child needs a structured environment. The worse thing you can do for a child is to have them not know what’s coming next,” she said.

Lowe added that it was important that parents not neglect their responsibility for one-on-one time with their children in the mapping of schedules.

“It is very important within that structure for the parent to spend an allotted time with the child. It is not a structure where parents abdicate their responsibility. They have to be a part of it too,” she noted.

Bell, for her part, said parents were crucial to ensuring balance was achieved.

“A six, seven or a eight-year-old cannot make decisions (about extra-curricular activities) so parents will have to make them for them. Parents will guide, but they have to be good guides,” Bell cautioned.

Identifying their child’s developmental stage is one of the ways to ensure one is being a good guide, the psychologist said.

“Remember that for each developmental stage, the child is able to do a particular set of tasks – based on their developmental age. So you wouldn’t want to burden a six-year-old with a whole heap of activities, because a six-year-old is interested in play activities – pretend play and fantasy play,” Bell said.

“That child should be allowed to go through that developmental stage, and complete the tasks there, instead of getting them overly concerned with activities that would not be helping them through that stage of development,” she added.

Abel echoed similar sentiments, noting that parents were at times “obsessed” with their children achieving.

“Sometimes parents are so obsessed with ensuring their children achieve and sometimes overachieve – sometimes even beyond their own levels of achievement,” he said.

“The reality is many parents try to live their lives through the life of their children. And then we over-structure the children’s lives, set very high standards and do not strike that happy balance.”

Bell suggested that parents also needed to pay attention to their children’s attitude to particular activities.

“If the parents allow the extra-curricular activities to become like a work situation instead of play, it is going to be stressful and not fun anymore. It would have lost its meaning. This is where the stress will come, when they (children) are being pressured to perform,” she said.

Communication, she noted, is also key because while the child may be too young to decide on the benefits of extra-curricular activities, he or she will have an input in so far as it concerns their level of enjoyment of the activity.

“You (as a parent) can ask questions to find out how they feel about it, how they enjoy it, how they getting on. And you must acknowledge the child’s feelings,” Bell added.

Abel, meanwhile underscored the need for communication.

“What parents should do is dialogue with them, communicate with them, and strike that common ground as to what they should be doing at all stages of the process so we take note of what each child likes,” he said.

“Not every child will like swimming, not every child will like to play tennis. So we must sit with our children, recognise their unique strengths and weaknesses so that we can work with them to achieve their own life goals and not ours,” he added.

Bell said that parents also needed to examine their own motives for having their children involved in extra-curricular activities.

“If these extra-curricular activities are really to satisfy the parents’ own longing for what they didn’t achieve, then this can be detrimental,” she said.

Lowe also cautioned against this.

“When it becomes a personal thing where ‘you have to succeed in one thing because I didn’t’, that is a problem. A child is a human being with rights like everybody else,” she said. “You have to be respectful to the individual and as long as you are sensitive to the child’s needs, then you don’t have a problem. There has to always be feedback,” Lowe noted.

Failure to achieve balance, the mental health workers say, will have negative consequences for the children. These consequences include stress and depression.

“Children, just like adults, who are engaged in multiple activities also will experience a level of stress. That level of stress will present itself in multiple ways, just like in adults,” said Bell. “You will find that these children will experience fatigue. You will find them not wanting to wake to go to school. Many of them suffer from anxiety and fear.”

One may also find that the child displays psychosomatic disorder, where their mental distress is manifested physiologically when there is nothing wrong with them physically.

“Some of the symptoms become psychosomatic, like bellyache and headache,” Bell said.

There is also, she added, the risk of behavioural disorders and, ultimately, underachievement in later life.

“Sometimes what it (a loaded schedule) does is force them (children) into adult roles too quickly, into taking on too much in terms of understanding the whole rubric of adult responsibilities. It robs them, sometimes, of transitioning normally through childhood,” Bell said. “Sometimes it ends up with non-achievement. The children become so tired to deal with the stress that is on them, they end up wanting to numb the feeling of not enjoying themselves. It can lead to drug use too, because they want to escape.”

Abel, too, noted the potential negative effects – including strained parent/child relations – of loading children’s schedules.

“At varying stages in the child’s development, the child may grow to resent it and rebel. (So) you get resentment, rebellion,” the psychiatrist said. “You find that children end up in career choices, sometimes even relationships that are not happy, and as adults they carry the resentment and bitterness for their parents for some of the inappropriate choices that were foisted on them.”