church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.
In a culture obsessed with productivity, some activities with potentially beneficial (but potentially hidden) outcomes can crowd out other seemingly more important activities, especially when one is overscheduled.
ty".88 William Temple, when advocating, in 1770, that poor children be sent at the age of four to work-houses where they should be employed in manufactures and given two hours' schooling a day, was explicit about the socializing influence of the process: There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertain- ing to them .... .9
Of course now the pendulum, for at least some, has swung the other direction and we now talk about over-scheduling our children.