I finally realized that the suburbs have plenty of troubles of their own. My work could start with whichever community cared about the issue I cared about and was open to working with me. (It's a little like how you operate when you're a new therapist: you don't so much choose your clients as you're grateful that they'll see you.) An opportunity emerged soon afterward. I was invited to give a talk to a group of parents in Wayzata, Minnesota, a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis–St. Paul, on reclaiming family time. Following my talk, many parents spoke up about feeling out of control regarding their kids' schedules and feeling helpless to restore a semblance of family life. Afterward, a middle-school principal confided in me, "We school leaders are part of this problem: we offer so many activities to kids that if parents agree to even half of them, they're not going to have much family life left." This brief exchange both startled and energized me. It drove home the reality that overscheduling wasn't just an individual family issue. In a hypercompetitive world, where parenting has become a form of product development, family time is a public issue.

Listen for Public Stories

With my newfound insight into the public dimensions of this problem, I moved to the next essential task of the citizen-therapist: talking with people in the community about the issue. Whenever I expressed curiosity about hockey schedules and missed family dinners and traveling leagues and cutthroat competitive dance, I was flooded with stories from exhausted, discouraged parents. When I asked my clients about their daily schedules (a topic I'd previously avoided as "too superficial"), they told me at length about their harried lives.

I learned to start conversations with parents in my community by passing on stories from previous conversations, which elicited vigorous nods and even more outrageous stories to pass on—like the 4-year-olds who practiced hockey at 5:00 a.m. on nursery school days (true story). Whenever I got myself invited to speak to PTA groups and church forums, I asked for more stories and invited attendees to reflect together on what's happened in our culture to bring this craziness upon us. Virtually every parent I talked to was eager to engage with this as a public issue.

Link the Personal to the Communal—in Public

It's relatively easy to get people talking about problems that bedevil their own families; it's a bigger challenge to help them connect their own stories to the community's story and to the work that lies ahead. At a town meeting in Wayzata for the launching of the Putting Family First project, I decided to address this challenge head-on. I put four questions to the 80-some parents, school board members, and community officials present: "Is this problem we're talking about here—overscheduled kids and underconnected families—only an individual family problem? or is it also a community problem? Are the solutions only individual family solutions? or are they also community solutions? Do you think this community is ready to take action? What actions should we take?"

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3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."