Why Do Our Elites Fear Free Time? – The American Conservative

As the product of a privileged background raising children among friends of a similar milieu and a history teacher to teens who by and large are also affluent, I have come to notice a disconcerting trend: the utter absence of free time among kids of the wealthy. Children s days are planned almost down to the minute, oftentimes starting in kindergarten or even earlier. When I try to set up playdates for my 5 year old, I get this response: We re booked up every day of the week, but maybe we can play on the weekend. What I recall in my childhood as a semi-spontaneous occurrence, free play, is now something that is planned weeks or months in advance.

The list of activities affluent youth are conscripted into would be vertiginous if it weren t so predictable for those of us who hail from the super zips, as Charles Murray calls them, around Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, New York, etc.: dance class or tennis one day, coding class the next, then piano, karate, or math tutoring and more.

Some readers of this piece may scoff, or imagine I am exaggerating. But this is how real people lead their lives or better put, their children s lives. Why? Why, I particularly ask myself, when, during Covid, so many of us paid lip service to the virtue of slowing down and getting our priorities straight ? Why, when so many of us told ourselves and each other that our pre-Covid lives were replete with unnecessary busyness and that now we were going to change? Time at home with family and very deliberative social outings within the Covid bubbles we chose showed us, or so we said, that we were all overbooked and overbusy. The new normal, post-Covid, would look different. We would come back to our social lives, our professional lives, and our family lives, with greater intentionality and singularity of purpose. And yet for many of us, particularly the well off who have enough disposable income to endlessly occupy our children, the Covid-induced epiphany has yielded once again to overly busy business as usual.

What, then, are the explanations? What do our elites have to fear from free time? Let me venture a few answers:

via www.theamericanconservative.com

It’s a fact and it ain’t rat.