Are you being too hard on your kids?

KD: What worked for you as a parent when you wanted to step back and not be so reactive or directive?

CH: Being aware the reflex is there. Say you overhear a parent saying, "Oh, Susan, who's nine, just started violin," and your reflexes go, "My nine-year-old should be playing violin." Realize that it's a reflex, take a deep breath and ask yourself, Does it make sense for my son to be doing violin now? Would he want to?

I take a kind of metaphoric deep breath and think, OK, that's a knee-jerk thing that just happened now. I remind myself – and I think this is really useful for people – to look around at the people in my own social circle and think about those I like and admire most. Then I think about how they got where they are. How many of them were valedictorians, Rhodes Scholars or labelled "gifted"? My guess is not that many. There are so many ways to grow up, but we wind ourselves up into this state of panic and think, My kids have two tracks: Rhodes Scholarship or a career at Tim Hortons.

KD: I was a "late bloomer." I "took off" academically in Grade 8. Late bloomers don't fare well in our hyper-parenting culture, do they?

CH: There is a basic belief that earlier is always better, but some of the most extraordinary people are late bloomers. They're working stuff out slowly at their own pace and then when they're good and ready they will stand up and change the world. Throughout history people who have turned civilization inside out were written off at school. Albert Einstein, for example. Look at sports: Jack Nicklaus didn't wander onto a golf course until his teens. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

KD: In terms of overscheduling kids, some children are in a lot of organized activities, but their parents swear that they love them.

CH: I'm not anti-activities. It's about the number of them and going into them with the right spirit. I've talked to parents who say, "Johnny has a nap between piano and hockey in thebackseat of the car." That's a pretty clear sign of being overloaded.

There is a kind of self-delusion that kicks in. The parents want to believe fervently that this is the best thing for the child; the child is happy and everything is hunky-dory. The child taps into that and realizes his parents are investing all this time, money and emotion in the activity, so he feels that he can't give it up or his parents will be disappointed.

As adults we're hyper-scheduled, very busy and probably doing too many things. Kids have inherited that and for a lot of them it can be sort of like a drug – this busy-ness – just as it is for grown-ups. We get hooked because then we don't have to deal with boredom, or unstructured time. Empty time, downtime, boredom…these are all good things, especially in a naturally busy household. Find a way to take time off activities and just say, "OK, we're going to have a couple weeks where, instead of playing organized sports, you're going to take your baseball and your glove and go to the park. Get some friends around and see what it's like to play without grown-ups telling you what to do."

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