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Comment by evrimoztamur | Hacker News Reader

This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older. Everybody is busy with their lives and coordinating even with your closest friends leads to 'agenda conflicts' that push your time together weeks or months ahead. It's sad to see that this is happening to kids (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.

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> (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.

Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries.

Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss when talking about american childrens typical day in school.

Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.

Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.

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...)

Would love to see updated numbers on it.

I think you’re confusing things a bit. Of course someone will be more successful at doing thing x if they are scheduled to do thing x.

That is good for planning/preparing for the future.

Being scheduled to the gills means that the ‘now’ is constantly filled with planning/preparing/doing things for the future though.

And with no time for the present or for being able to think/daydream.

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.

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.

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 :/

> this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures

This is a major thing in many East Asian cultures as well, China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea. Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm, so that kids aren't studying past midnight, but some academies still stay open secretly as the parents are demanding the extra hours. It's a vicious circle: kids compete for the few spots in top universities so they can get into the best companies, average qualifications rise, so next generation have to compete even harder for the same few spots.

This is carried over to the US as well. Asians compete for the few spots in top universities, as they are held to higher standards already, and this just keep ratcheting up the average standard for Asians each generation.

I'm not familiar with this custom, but wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim? Surely after some point you hit diminishing returns, and after that it becomes downright damaging (in terms of mental health etc). So I'd expect the cycle to balance itself after a while, with parents eventually recognizing the importance of downtime. What gives?

(I suppose the answer is that there's an economic incentive in squeezing your kids into a pressure cooker of endless commitments, to the point where the pros outweigh the cons; but this assumption makes me feel like I'm being unfairly cynical to the parents in question.)

Depends. If you think it is just diminishing returns, than you always get more the more you put in. Just not as much. You have to drop to negative returns for that to go away.

And indeed, in that framing, it is going to be tough to make it so that those who can afford to spend their time shouldn't do so.

So, are there policies where we could make it so that folks can put a legit value in the things they are neglecting for this extra spend in time? I can certainly hope so.

You end up with generational trauma, Asian parents who were worked to the bone as children, saw peers find higher-paying jobs as a result, the people who had mental breakdowns are presumably brushed aside and viewed as a source of shame, many keep grinding through the system because the alternative is poverty as a farmer, end up with scars repressed and treating their children the same way... and the children who break from the pressure bond over the Internet and try to treat each other with kindness, but are often unable to provide for each other because they're too mentally scarred to find jobs and make a living.

> wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim?

Depends on what you mean. Afterschool activities often include sports, so there's some balance between academics and physical activities, but physical activities won't get you into a good school unless you are at a competitive level, so there are high pressures there as well.

As for parents who recognize the importance of downtime? The ones that can afford it... send their kids overseas. But of course, even with added downtime, those kids are more academically competitive, so they end up ratcheting up the standards in the area they go to.

After bedtime, I would grab a book, creep into the bathroom, and hop into the dry bathtub to read. I preferred this to a flashlight under the covers.

Mom would find me, send me back to bed, and shame me for reading. Then I was further shamed and humiliated when I was fitted for spectacles in third grade. Of course my parents blamed myopia on reading books in poor lighting.

That bathroom was actually the site of innumerable playtimes for me. Battleships and Cartesian divers in the tub, Rubik's cube maintenance, trying to get my alligator lizard to drink from the tap. It was a dingy, dusty playground where I felt kinda safe and clean.

Question is, what did you read? I don't think these kids going to night school are there to read popular youth literature.

TFA subject is "Play".

Myopia is caused by spending time indoors without full wavelength sun exposure btw. Two hours outdoors when the sun is bright should be enough.

Hindsight is 20/20!

Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm

similarly, china banned private afterschool services for school subjects. i don't know how effective the ban is, but their argument was similar.

I am in Europe, have friends in 4 different countries and extracurriculars are a thing in all of them.

A good approach is for a social circle to block out social time. Saturday night, every other week or every third week seems to be the sweet spot where it's constant enough to make people not create recurring conflicts, but sparse enough that people can still make other weekend plans. Not everyone can make it every time, but between people inviting new people and a core group of regulars, you can keep it up in perpetuity.

> This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older.

Bring back the pop-in!

A pop in? Where a friend just shows up unannounced with a knock at your door and a tip of the hat and says they were just in the neighborhood and felt like they should drop and has a seat on your couch?

Sure. Maybe they catch you at an awesome time, maybe they don't and they leave- it's a pop-in after all. Keep expectations low. At least you saw them.

That goes back to a time when most homes had a stay-at-home homemaker.

Today, I'm not really crazy about the idea of a random pop-in, having to cut the few hours of time that I do have for laundry, dishes, or just a bit of down time, to have to make coffee and find snacks and sit down for a chat. If I were home all day that would be quite different, or so I think.

Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in.

Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.

I feel like a literal pop in does not work for many people due to mobile phones and suburbs. Suburbs make it so you have to go at least a little out of your way to visit someone, which means you might as well call to make sure they are available before wasting your time on a detour.

Although, I see no problem with impromptu visits, I get them all the time. They just happen to call or text before coming.

Agree. Even when I was a kid, "pop-ins" were only immediate neighbors, maybe within a 3-4 house radius. Anyone farther away you'd call first, even with landlines.

These days many people don't even know the names of the people living across the street.

That works if someone isn’t frantically trying to get from point A to point B, or so overwhelmed they are trying to find some time to stop and think. That’s the challenge for most Suburban parents around here anyway.

Everyone is busy at times, but if you are always frantically trying to get from A to B or overwhelmed, that's probably an issue in its own right in need of addressing.

Of course! That’s also practically what most middle class folks with kids are in all day every day. Upper middle class too.

If not that well off, it’s usually worse.

And near as I can tell, that barely keeps their head above water, if that.

I was about to read HN now what

This is how my grandparents and their friends do it and they clearly have better communication with their friends than I do with mine.

Maybe this whole "scheduling" things was a mistake.

Meanwhile in the real world, most folks seem to have a panic attack if anyone knocks on their door. Or they have to make a phone call.

Ughh..this is not an exaggeration. I remember recently when Amazon delivered a package to my house meant for a neighbor down the street. I had time so I walked over and knocked on the door. After about a minute I saw a young lady barely pulling the window blinds apart to peek out. When she saw there was still someone there (an out of shape nerd who looks like a Best Buy worker—the opposite of intimidating) just holding a package, she let out a shriek from the depths of damnation, and basically stood there screaming until I set the package down and walked away. You could hear it from the sidewalk. People have gone la la.

I think the advent of cell phones killed the pop in, everyone can call or text now before popping in.

or just shoot a text to say hi and check in.

no need to roll up and see how your week has been, just send someone a how-do and maybe to a 5 min facetime

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