Are you being too hard on your kids?

This story was originally titled "Easing Up on Your Kids" in the September 2008 issue. Subscribe to Canadian Living today and never miss an issue!

The typical to-do list of many parents looks something like this in the fall.
• Book piano lessons.
• Register for hockey.
• Call teacher to ask if Jack's in the right reading group – and why there's no math homework yet.
• Ask the Pattersons if they are signing Lauren up for Kumon again – you can share the driving.
• Find out how many volunteer hours Matt still has to complete.

Author Carl Honoré encourages us to do something radical with that little list taped to the fridge or stored in your Blackberry. Rip it up; press delete. That's right. The Edmonton-born guru of the "slow movement," who penned the bestseller In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Changing the Cult of Speed (Knopf Canada, 2004), wants us to take a deep breath and really rethink how we're raising our kids.

In his new book, Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (Knopf Canada, 2008), Honoré, who now lives in London, England, with his wife and two children, says our well-intended but stifling efforts are sucking the joy out of childhood. We are raising a generation of "overprogrammed, overachieving, exhausted children" who – surprise, surprise – may not have the skills or creativity to compete in the evolving work world.

Here, Honoré talks to Kathryn Dorrell, Canadian Living Magazine's Family Life editor and mom of two, about how we can let go and help our kids – and ourselves – live simpler, yet richer, lives.

Kathryn Dorrell: There's a lot of talk about kids having too much homework. Yet I have also heard parents comment that our kids need to be able to compete against their global peers in the future.

Carl Honoré: Homework is the perfect metaphor for a lot of the ways we micromanage children today. It looks like a no-brainer: more work means better results. But overloading children can be a waste of time, or backfire by turning kids off or by narrowing the time they have to do other things.

As we move into the next stage of global economic development, the countries that will thrive are not those whose children are exam-passing automatons. We need people who can sit with an idea, think creatively, work in teams, and who will relish learning their whole lives. Those people will invent the next IPod or a new formula for organizing companies.

A lot of parents in Asia who have money are looking at the education system locally and saying, "This is not going to equip our children for the 21st century. I'm going to send my kids to Vancouver or Sydney to a school where they will have a bit more room to breathe. It won't all be about passing, rote learning and exams."

In Finland, they have very little homework, and they don't do any standardized exams really until the end of high school. There's a lot of group work and self-assessment, and they don't have any private tutoring. At the same time, when the Finns do have exams, they knock the socks off everyone. They're top of the pops in numeracy, literacy and science.

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