the overscheduled parent It was William Doherty, the professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and adviser to ECFE, who, in 1999, first coined the phrase “overscheduled kids,” thus contributing the perfect term to describe the sudden proliferation of play dates and extracurricular activities on children’s agendas, as if they’d all suddenly acquired chiefs of staff. Overscheduling has earned more than its share of critics, who fear it makes kids anxious and robs them of the glories of imaginative idling and unstructured play. But few critics think to ask what kind of
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