High Maintenance Mom

I have been thinking about what activities to put my almost 4 year old daughter in recently and have been getting a lot of suggestions from friends. She is in pre school every morning and we have a lot of fun post nap with various outings, etc. I just don't feel the need to have her in ballet, gymnastics, singing, etc...all of which have been suggested she do now. That does not mean she wont do them but not today. As I had this in my brain, I can across an interesting article about "slow parenting". I liked the ring of it so I continued reading and also found some articles on line. The term seemed to (from what I can gather from a blog with an email interview with the author) come from the followers of Carl Honore's books, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (Plus) and Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting .... It suggests that kids are racing through their early years with days filled with school and a truck load of activities. Some households so busy that dinner comes in shifts to accommodate the various schedules of the kids. I have to admit that when I first came across the term I thought, Hmmm, slow....we're not a slow family, we are active, we do things! Then I realized after some more reading that the term doesn't mean staying at home and everything taking forever to do, rather it means doing things that mean something and not just doing things to "do things". I am a huge (I mean huge) fan of the family dinner and have written about it before. My husband certainly could stay later at work but races home so we can all have dinner together at a reasonable hour. I also think free play somehow got lost in the race for children to have an impressive resume by age 8. I have friends with 3 children who do a very nice job of balancing all of the interests of the kids while still making time for them to just chill out with unstructured free play. It's something worth thinking about but may also be something very hard to parents to admit (that their kids are over structured) and very hard to change. I mean, who wants to tell their 4 year old there is no more gymnastics, Spanish class and dance each week so the family can take a breathe and be.....just be.