It's no secret that how children spend their time out of school can have a major effect on how they achieve in school. New research supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has identified some interesting shifts over the past two decades in the ways children spend their out-of-school hours.

Clearly, many households are responding to the rigors of a dual-income society with more order and organization in their children's free time. Time spent participating in organized sports more than doubled between 1981 and 1997, according to the NICHD survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The figures show that children on average now spend more than five hours per week in organized sports. Participation in day care, preschool and after-school programs also has jumped.

In 1997, children spent about eight hours more per week in these programs than in 1981. It's also more common to see kids helping to "run the house"--hardly surprising in this age of time-strapped families. From 1981 to 1997, children "spent three hours more per week doing household work, including shopping," NICHD reports.

So what are the big time-spent "losers" over the past two decades? The family meal appears to be one casualty. Children spent about one hour less per week eating in 1997 than they did in 1981, reports NICHD. "Less time spent eating is another indication that the work-family time crunch is affecting children." Kids also have much less time for unstructured play--about three hours less time in 1997 than they had in 1981. Television viewing also dropped over that span by about two hours per week, but the average 13 hours per week devoted to the "box" still commands a hefty amount of that rapidly dwindling commodity known as children's free time.

"Free time--defined as time left over after eating, sleeping, personal care and attending school, preschool or day care--decreased from 38 percent to 30 percent of a child's day" between 1981 and 1997, NICHD reports. "One-quarter of that free time is spent watching television."

Much more modest gains were reported for reading and doing homework. The total time spent studying rose from almost 90 minutes a week to slightly more than two hours between 1981 and 1997. Researchers caution, however, that these averages are dampened by the fact that they include preschoolers. Reading rose from about an hour a week to one hour, 16 minutes.

One of the key findings of the survey draws a direct link between high academic achievement and children whose parents have high expectations for them and spend time with their offspring. Researchers looked at 13 different activities--from washing and folding clothes, to looking at books and reading together--and found that children whose parents reported doing the most activities with them tended to have the highest scores on an applied math test. "These findings suggest that home activities can prepare children for practical problem solving," according to the NICHD report.

The study was based on a nationally representative sample of roughly 3,600 children under age 13. Findings are part of a new long-term study of children and families. The ongoing study is designed to help researchers examine the school achievement, social development and health of children across the social spectrum. More information is available at www.isr.umich.edu/src/child-development/home.html.

Poetry 180 Web site

As part of his endeavor to make poetry "an important and enriching part of the school day," AFT member Billy Collins, the current poet laureate of the United States, has posted the first collection of works for his Poetry 180 project on the Internet. (See American Teacher, February 2001, for more on Collins.) The poet's goal is for high schools to have the reading of one poem--by a student, teacher, administrator, support staff or other--made a routine feature of the school's daily announcements. (Thus, the Poetry 180 name--for the number of days in a typical school year.) In another sense, Collins hopes the title "implies a turning back--in this case, to poetry." But poetry in the sense of something to be listened to and appreciated without accompanying academic requirements.

To make it as easy as possible for high schools to participate, Collins and the Library of Congress have put together an attractive and viewer-friendly Web site (www.loc.gov/poetry/180). It includes an introduction by Collins, a member of the AFT-affiliated Professional Staff Congress and Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York's Lehman College. He offers a rationale for the project: "Hearing a poem every day, especially well-written, contemporary poems that students do not have to analyze, might convince students that poetry can be an understandable, painless and even eye-opening part of their everyday experience."

If schools can't feature a daily poem, the poet laureate says, something is better than nothing, so a poem every other day or even once a week might be a way to start. He also offers a few basic pointers on how to read a poem aloud because "we know that a poem will live or die depending on how it is read." To date, the site includes 64 works. Where necessary, Collins includes a one-sentence introduction. The collection starts, appropriately enough, with one of his own works, "Introduction to Poetry."

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