The Hurried, Harried Child

Many studies have concluded that the idyllic American childhood — wherever it existed in middle- and upper-class homes, or in our literature and imagination — is a thing of the past.

The kind of carefree childhood in which kids mostly minded their manners and their parents, read books without being assigned to, and whiled away their many free hours playing stickball in the street, fishing down at the creek, and fretting about not much at all except whom to ask to the senior prom.

Young Ted. I don't look stressed here, do I? I wasn't.
Young Ted. I don’t look stressed here, do I? I wasn’t.
My own childhood was a bit like that. I assembled and played with model trains, pretended I was a baseball star while chasing a ball thrown against the back steps, and spent many an hour lying in fields, sucking on a ragweed stem and thinking about clouds and girls and the Cleveland Browns football team.

Childhood involved lots of dreams and skinned knees, not nervous breakdowns.

Then something changed in America. Something sucked the fun out of childhood.

In 1981, Tufts University psychologist David Elkind published a book that got Americans talking and worrying. The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast was a scathing indictment of American parenting. It described a condition in which moms and dads overscheduled their children and prodded them unceasingly to achieve in academics and sports.

The result was soon labeled the “hurried child syndrome.” And the nation hadn’t seen anything yet.