Continued from Page 1

Homework and After-School Activities
Residents of the United States currently hold first place for working more hours than any other nation, and we now appear to be moving our children in the same direction. As job security and long-term financial security seem less and less assured, schoolwork and grade performance are more important than ever. As a result, many parents are exhausted, not only from jobs, housework, and parenting, but from their children's homework and the hundreds of activities in which many children are involved. Parents whose children are in public schools have to work increasingly hard to make sure that their children get an adequate education, while also worrying about their physical safety.

Wealthier parents are moving their children to private schools as the public schools worsen every year from a lack of funding for teachers and educational supplies.

This increased emphasis on a hands-on education means more and more work for overwhelmed parents as they try to lessen the load for their overwhelmed children. Playing has been replaced with play-dates; free time has been replaced with structured time, hanging out in the neighborhood until dark has been replaced by hanging out in the neighborhood under the watchful eyes of kidnap-wary adults.

Our view of parenthood has also changed by the fact that many parents of today have gone through their own psychotherapy and gained a thorough understanding of the ways that their parents harmed, neglected, or mistreated them. As a result, they know firsthand the damage that can be done through parental errors, and feel terrified that they'll hurt their children in the same way that they felt hurt by their parents. Knowing the mistakes of their parents may cause them to be fiercely committed to be the kind of parent that they never had.

Unfortunately, many pursue this entirely noble task at the costs to their own health 4 and the health of their marriages.

While men are hardly immune to these worries, women are bearing the major brunt of this child-emphasis. This is because this increased consciousness occurs at a time when, among other things, mothers are less likely than ever to have the time, resources, and energy to do what they would like to be good mothers. While women now have unprecedented opportunities to enter the workforce and to establish meaningful and rewarding careers, many feel torn by the division of loyalties they feel between their children's needs, and their needs to support their families, or to maintain outside interests.

Paradoxically, this new cultural emphasis on children occurs at a time when our society's commitment to parents is lower than it's been in decades. More and more employers are demanding workloads and schedules which create chaos for families, and introduce even greater obstacles to maintaining healthy and intact marriages. Studies show that parents who have to work night shifts or rotating shifts have a greater likelihood of divorcing than those with more stable schedules.

Because at least half of today's marriages will end in divorce, women and men feel an increased sense of worry and insecurity about whether their particular family will still be together in the next month, year, or decade. Many become preoccupied with their children because it's the one stable relationship that they can expect to have in the future.