Hyperparenting is becoming a real issue here as parents sign children up for all types of after-school activities in a bid to give them a headstart, writes Theresa Judge
Before you sign your child up for an array of classes and extracurricular activities, you should ask yourself if everything you organise is really in the child's best interest.
That's the advice of psychologists and parenting advisers who say they are seeing signs that some children's lives are overscheduled.
The concept of "hyperparenting" and the damage it may be doing has been receiving considerable media attention, particularly in the United States. But as Irish society has changed over recent years with a greater emphasis on success and competition in various realms of life, it appears both parents and children are coming under growing pressure - parents don't want to feel other people's children are getting a headstart and children have to "perform" in an ever-expanding list of activities from football to t'ai chi, from hip hop to chess.
"The pressure to succeed at school in the points race, to get seven As in the Leaving Cert, is starting to be paralleled in pressure to perform at leisure activities," says clinical psychologist Paul Kelly, who works at the student counselling service in UCD.
He believes it is good for children to go to some organised activities but that the need for a balance cannot be overemphasised.
Students at third level often feel they are failing even when they are doing well because they have come through a system based on competition, he says.
"What is going on reflects changes in Irish culture over recent years. There are more people at university and there is huge competition. Everyone expects to be special and to excel. You can't blame parents because they also exist in that culture and they feel pressure to compete to be perfect parents," Kelly adds.
Susan Daly, who works with Parentline, a helpline for parents, agrees that many children are not getting enough time to interact with other children in an informal way, without adult supervision, or to learn how to occupy themselves when there is no organised activity.
She says there are different reasons why parents may overschedule their child's life - they want their child to get the opportunity to try different things, or they may find it easier to send a child to classes rather than having to think of things to do with the child themselves.
Daly believes it can come down to a question of confidence - parents need confidence to refuse a child's request to start a new activity and they also need confidence to feel that the time their child spends with them is valuable. She stresses the need for moderation.
"There is a lot of competition among parents to be doing the best for their children but parents have to ask if it is really the best for the child," she says.
Parents need to realise that they can't do everything, that they cannot control everything in their children's lives or make everything alright for them, she says. "Children learn a lot from interacting in an informal way. They need time to be with other children, to talk and listen, to have rows and learn to sort it out themselves," she says.
Paul Kelly says a child whose life is overscheduled can lose a sense of their own initiative and miss valuable creative play. "Children's free time is being eroded. We live in a very risk-aware culture where parents are worried about their children's safety but when children are supervised all the time, they have less and less time to think and work things out for themselves," he says.
It is also pointed out that children need time to form good friendships with other children and activities that are very structured may not allow this to happen.
However, while most people would agree that balance and moderation are needed and that it is not a good idea for your child to see you mainly from behind as you drive a car from one activity to the next, knowing exactly where that balance lies is not always clear-cut.
One father who admits that two of his children may be verging on doing too much says they have resisted his attempts to get them to cut down on some sports. "If they say they want to go and are enjoying it, it's very hard to force them to stop. I think it's better than having them sitting at home looking at TV," he says.
Kelly says it is difficult to give general guidelines about what is a reasonable level of activity as each parent should try to read the signs in their own child.
"If the child is under pressure, if they are anxious about their performance and anxious about getting it right, and striving for perfectionism or beating themselves up about it and just generally not really enjoying the activity, then that is a sign parents have to watch for," Kelly says.
The culture of competition and perfectionism is affecting people psychologically, he believes. In UCD he sees students who feel they have to get first class honours in their essays and if they don't they can get unhappy and depressed. "We try to help them to see that there is not something wrong in themselves but that it is from feelings engendered in them from the system they have come through, both from the school system and also maybe at home from parents," he adds.
For parents who want more information on the topic there are various websites that try to tease out the problem.
For example, the Child Study Center at New York University describes hyperparenting as "being overly involved, overly controlling, overly stimulating - parents usually hover over their children and make day-to-day decisions for them: what to eat, what to wear, what to do after school, who to play with".
The result, it says, is that children do not get enough opportunities to develop a sense of self-confidence - "the unspoken message children get from all the controlling and scheduling and scrutiny is that they're not capable of making decisions and solving their own problems".
Children might feel they are not trusted, and may become overly dependent or become angry and resentful.
However, not everybody has the problem of examining whether their child is overscheduled. For parents on low incomes many of these activities are too expensive and they may live in areas where there is very little for children to do, says Aine Lynch, chief executive of the primary section of the National Parents' Council.
"In some areas of the country and of the cities there is literally nothing for children to do after school and there are no safe play areas and this can translate into the children hanging around at corners," Lynch says.
She agrees that children need free time both to play and to rest and to learn to structure their own time. When it comes to organising activities, she says, it is "important for parents to plan these with children rather than for children", to look at what interests them and what will provide positive experiences.
Overall it appears that in the rush to be good at everything it is easy to forget that simply doing everyday things with children where there is no pressure to perform is often what they enjoy most.
Psychologist Marie Murray points parents in the direction of Seamus Heaney's poem Clearanceswhere he describes being alone with his mother "when all the others were away at Mass" and he was "all hers".
The activity they were engaged in? Peeling potatoes. But Heaney says they were "never closer the whole rest of our lives" and many of us probably value similar childhood memories of quiet times with our parents.