Spend more time as a family. Eat dinner together. Go on vacation, even if the best you can do is turn off the phone and hunker down together in the den. It seems like you can’t pick up a newspaper or community flier or women’s magazine without being told that nothing is better for kids than hanging out with their family.

Why, then, do we allow athletic coaches — often in the same schools that are espousing more family time — to ask — nay, demand — that parents forgo a family vacation so their children can get in more  practice time? A woman I know whose son plays on his high school basketball team is determined not to be badgered. Her family is a third of the way through their project to travel to every state in America. Next up are Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, which they plan to visit during Christmas break. The coach doesn’t want the boy to go. The family is sticking with their plan, but not without a lot of tension and guilt.The mother of another boy on the team wants to take him skiing, but the boy is too scared to miss a practice.

Is it fair to ask parents and kids to make these kinds of choices? I know some parents who refuse to let their children miss a practice or a game, saying that it’s an important life lesson to know that when you sign up for a team it means that you keep your commitments to the team. But shouldn’t we honor our commitments to our families, too?

Image by striatic via Flickr

As if wrapping yet another gift and having nine people for Hannukah dinner tonight weren’t enough, I just took a break for a wee bit more masochism and read two articles (here and here) about how overblown and present-laden this minor Jewish holiday has become here in America, where we all know that Happy Holidays really means Merry Christmas.

I know full well that Hannukah has become too commercial and too much like Christmas. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. Having grown up in a wishy-washy sort of Jewish family that some years celebrated Hannukah and some years exchanged presents on Christmas morning, I’m just happy that my children know “from whence they come” (to borrow a phrase from Adelaide in the very Christian musical “Guys and Dolls”).

It’s not easy being a Jewish child in December, especially in a town that has an official tree lighting and a visit from Santa at the village hall. My younger son has mentioned more than once how envious he is of his “half and half” friends who celebrate Christmas and Hannukah. It’s not just the present tally that makes him (ever)green, it’s the whole spectacle of the holiday.

Our Hannukah may be less than “pure,” meaning that my kids get more than chocolate money as gifts. But by lighting candles, eating latkes and gathering with family, we are celebrating our own religious freedom and our decision not to assimilate. If that is accompanied by unwrapping a long-desired toy or even a new (mon dieu!) video game, it doesn’t make it any less important.

Having worked as a journalist and been indoctrinated by necessity into the  “find three examples and you’ve got a story” school of feature writing, I’m predisposed to be skeptical of the kind of trend stories that routinely appear in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times. So I don’t really believe Time’s recent story about the “backlash against over-parenting,” but I think it’s worth reading anyway.

According to Time, so-called “helicopter” or “bubble wrap” parents are being challenged by proponents of a new, more laid-back movement:

The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down. via Can These Parents Be Saved: The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting – TIME.

As far as I can tell, the “insurgency” consists of a few good authors (Carl Honore, Lenore Skenazy) and child psychologists writing about the dangers of over-parenting. Sure, there’s interest in these books and, according to Time at least, some consultants out there holding workshops on how to chill out as a parent (attending such workshops, however, seems like over-parenting of another kind).

My guess is that books challenging helicopter parenting will be read mostly by people predisposed to the idea and the rest of the parents out there will be just as over-protective and over-achieving for their children as ever. Just go to your local PTA meeting or 10U soccer game if you don’t believe me.

But I got a reminder last night that there are other people out there who have the experience and perspective to get hyped-up parents to chill out and should be, as ever, heeded: wise teachers. Last night was teacher conference night at my son’s middle school. And despite the speed-dating aura of the back-to-back 10-minute conferences, I got some valuable insight from two teachers who have spent years working with 11-year-olds.

The first was my son’s music teacher. My son is considering taking up saxophone again and before I went out and rented another alto sax for him to not practice, I asked the teacher how much he expected the kids to practice, thinking he would say something like 10 minutes a day.

“Eleven-year-olds? Who are we kidding – between homework and after-school sports and activities, hardly at all.”

He explained that my son would have band practice in school three times a week and if, in addition to that, he played once or twice over the weekend, he’d be fine. It was a huge relief. I realized that my son could start playing saxophone again without feeling like it was a big commitment, and that maybe he would just find it…..fun. Like an 11-year-old should. Would he improve more if he practiced at home every night? Sure. But who cares? Maybe if he just really likes it, he’ll continue and will get serious when he’s ready to.

I had a similar conversation with my son’s science teacher. My son loves science and is getting As without working too hard. Thinking he needed to be challenged more, I asked the teacher if perhaps she could give him extra work to do at home. I thought he was being a little lazy, which annoyed me.

“I could give him extra projects to do at home,” the teacher told me, “but I doubt he’d do them.”

She was right — this was a boy who likes to spend as little time on homework as possible. Extra work would not interest him as it would cut into his basketball/football/computer time.  She advised me to just let him be the science-happy kid he is and urge him to keep his grade up next year so he can place into honors science in 8th grade. At that point, he will not only be much more challenged by the curriculum, but he’ll be ready to take it on. “It’s developmental,” she told me. “When he’s a little older, he’ll be ready to work harder. It will come from inside him.”

What a novel idea, studying as developmental. Indeed, why was I expecting my 11-year-old to buckle down and study like a 16-year-old facing imminent college applications? Why would I want my child to start stressing out about school and spending less time playing?

So much of this rampant “over-parenting” comes from our fears about the future, as if the 11-year-old who wants to play Runescape and shoot hoops in the back yard might turn into an adult who forgets to get a job or can’t get a good job because he doesn’t do anything other than play Runescape and shoot hoops in the back yard. It sounds too dumb for all these smart parents out there, but I think we do forget that our kids are …kids.

The best way to squelch one’s inner hyper-parent is to think less about what we want for our children’s future and more about what’s appropriate for them right now, at their current age and developmental stage, and then try to let them be. Whether we hover or not, they will grow up.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

At 7:20 this morning, while running to catch the 7:27 train to the city, I was the “the best Mom in the world.” Why? Because I was letting my 9-year-old son skip school to take him to the ticker-tape parade for the Yankees. I got that compliment several times today, not just from my very happy son, but from several commuting parents I ran into on the train into the city and again on the way home.

By 4:50 p.m., back home and on the way to pick up my older son from rugby practice, I had morphed into the “world’s worst Mom.” Why? Because I had told my parade-going son, who had gotten up at 5 a.m. from sheer excitement and who never once complained about the cold or the two and half hour wait to see his Yankees heroes, that he could not have a sleep-over tonight.

I knew he didn’t mean it, and that it was his extreme fatigue speaking when he pleaded with me and whined about how horrible I was. But his hyperbole, and my sweet but all-too-brief presence in his motherhood hall of fame, reminded me that while taking him to the parade was a really nice thing to do (and who are we kidding — no hardship for me), it is not the kind of thing that makes one “the best Mom in the world.”

Reaching that bar is a lot harder and takes not a few hours in a single special day, but many, many years. The journey is more fun, however, when you can punctuate it with the occasional grand and thrilling gesture. I may not be the world’s best mother, but it was one hell of a great day.

Image via Wikipedia

I have an acquaintance,  a successful foreign correspondent, whose serious television habit as an adolescent ended the day his fed-up mother grabbed his television and threw it out his bedroom window. What did he do? He started reading books. Or so he told me.

I thought of this tale when I read in the LATimes today that television watching among children is at an eight-year high, with children spending more than an entire day in front of the television in an average week.  My children are starting to watch more TV lately and I know it’s only going to get worse because it’s Autumn, which every parent know leads to the next season, Screens.

It’s inevitably winter when I start fretting that my boys are indulging in too much screen time, which for my older son means too many hours playing Runescape, which gives us both a headache, and for my younger son means too many episodes of iCarly, which makes him so sassy that I want to give him a Nickelectomy.

I’ve considered tossing the television out the window, but I doubt it would fit. And just unplugging the electronics is really not feasible. I’m a blogger and a telecommuter. My husband is not just a news junkie, but is employed by a television station. And then there’s the Yankees. And Mad Men.

So where does this leave me? It leaves me thinking not just about my bookish journalist friend, or about all the warnings in the LATimes article (childhood obesity, delayed language skills, missed opportunities to get the pure value of old-fashioned “play”) but also about my 19-year-old nephew Sam.

I adore Sam, who is smart, passionate, inquisitive, hard-working, outdoorsy and kind. But the reason I am grateful to him has nothing to do with any of that. I am grateful to him for having turned out all right despite the many, many hours he spent as a child watching television and playing video games, including the violent ones. Despite a childhood that was utterly and completely plugged in, Sam is anything but tuned out.

There are many reasons that excessive television watching is a waste of time, and many good things that happen — to children and families — when the screens are turned off. But what’s true in general is not an absolute for every child. It’s the larger context — the quality of the non-screen time part of life — that matters, not whether you’re fulfilling every item on the good parenting checklist.

Just as throwing your child’s television out the window will not turn him into a successful foreign correspondent, allowing your child to indulge in some television will not guarantee an adulthood as a flabby slacker.

Which is to say, go ahead and turn off the screens more often. Or leave them on and try to stop worrying about it. Either way, it’s not going to turn your child into someone he’s not meant to be.