The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap

If you've just sat down after a day that included taking your very intelligent child to a Kumon math tutoring session, shuttling another to soccer practice and piano lessons, supervising the homework of both to make sure it's perfect, and making a midnight trip to the grocery store to pick up the organic grapes for tomorrow's nutritionally balanced lunches, then Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard? is for you. According to authors Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., and Nicole Wise, there's a lot of this kind of hyper-parenting going on out there. This parenting style can be loosely defined as one that attempts to control everything in a child's environment with the aim of achieving a perfect outcome. It's not realistic or healthy, say the authors. Chapter by chapter, examining everything from parents' reliance on "expert" opinions to the huge impact of media messages on parent behavior, Rosenfeld and Wise make a compelling argument for their premise. They encourage parents to turn the lens inward and ask themselves what messages they are sending--not with their words, but with their behavior. Hyper-Parenting is a book for parents at every stage in the parenting game. It's never too late, or too early, to try to tune out some of the noisy clamor around us and thoughtfully reflect on our values and what we really want for our children. --Virginia Smyth