Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...)
I myself went to music lessons for a bit and did take some extra classes to catch up. But it was an hour or two a week here and there. I still had 4 out of 5 afternoons to myself any given year. And no stuff on weekends. It’s incomparable to kids schedules today.
To be fair, my schedule got quite busy in final years. But it was because I started building websites for €€€. But I doubt it’s comparable to parents-scheduled extracurricular activities. And I learned programming in my free unstructured time by myself.
I'm not confusing it. I'm questioning if people are really more scheduled today.
Especially as we get to middle and high school. Many of us had jobs back then. Isn't uncommon for many small businesses to have a lot of help they use their children for. Not even going back to farms. Though, hard not to see all of the chores that many of those would have around the place as scheduled.
Edit: Tried to stealth fix, but I did flip a less to a more at the top there. Apologies for anyone that may respond to my mistake there.
Ah! I’m not sure if I saw your post before the edit or not. To respond to what you’re saying..
I’m not 100% sure what is real and what is selection bias. What is due to class shifts, increased income earning, etc. too. This seems like something that should have studies around it with actual data, but I couldn’t find it directly with a quick search.
All I’ve personally experienced is seeing parents (and myself) struggle to get kids into various activities due to the huge demands on our own time/mental energy, and trying to figure out how to get a good outcome for the kids from it. All of these folks I know were either from low middle and now high middle, or high middle and still high middle class backgrounds.
Upper class type folks already had a set of things they ‘did’, and while there was competition, it looked different.
I found [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6720124/] which is quite interesting, but that also seems to be oriented around ‘what do various types of extracurricular activities/after school social interactions actually produce’.
Which is very interesting, and goes more to the outcome as compared to changes over time.
I think we are aligned. I certainly am more exposed to this as a parent than I remember seeing it as a kid. I can look back and remember all of my friends had sports/music/church/etc far more than I did, though.
That is, I feel it acutely, but not clear how much of this is the biases you named. Would love to see studies. I also failed finding any. I also agree it is almost certainly studied.
Doesn't make a difference for college admission, and it likely will not for a long time. It's mostly grades that decide who get's into college and bologna affirms that you have a free choice on where to attend. It does make sense to prepare your child for college in such a way that it is able to live self sufficiently and teach discipline in learning, but no university gives a crap on what debate club you ran in high school.
Discipline is one of those things that are truly important. But I don’t think parents-overscheduled activities help that much with it. Otherwise discipline goes out the window when nobody is on your shoulder anymore.
Learning to live self sufficiently is better with unstructured time IMO. When you have to learn to put together your own schedule, follow it and do day-to-day tasks. It’s horrible how many kids can’t make themselves dinner and clean up the house after themselves. Because kid is always busy and mommy takes care of everything because little 18 y/o is so tired. Of course it doesn’t help that in many cases mommy can’t do much better than microwave dinner or order a takeout :/
Would love to see updated numbers on it.