Tonight, I attended a screening of this film that highlights the dark side of our over-achieving communities.  I live in a highly competitive town where kids are under played and over scheduled. Most are tutored and just about everyone is on some sort of travel team for sports- regular ol’ AYSO soccer is just not good enough!  High school is one big race to the “best” college, parents cough up mega bucks for SAT classes, college advisers and community service opportunities that will make their kid look good on applications. Kids take multiple AP courses and have no scheduled lunch period so they can squeeze it all in. The movie portrayed my community very accurately with success being defined by what college you go to along with an overemphasis on making money. Two of my daughters have been through this high stress high school and I’m just not certain I can muster up enough energy to put my third one through this gauntlet. Stop the merry go round, I want to get off!

The message in this movie is less homework and more family dinners. It will take some swimming upstream and there is no easy fix. How to get off this treadmill and raise a happy, motivated and creative human being? How do we re-define success and make happiness as important a metric as math scores?

This is one reason I’m taking my daughter out of school for a week long illegal absence and bringing her with me and my husband for Italy.  I hope she’ll learn more in 5 days visiting Rome and Florence than she will in 5 days of middle school.

Why would I take my kid out of school to go to Italy in the middle of October?  I have a good excuse! I was selected by Slow Food USA to be a  US delegate to this year’s Terra Madre event in Turin, Italy. Terra Madre is an international conference of over 7,000 food producers, cooks, educators and activists. Every four years, network delegates come together to discus global food sustainability issues.  My hubby, who is a whiz at playing the frequent flyer game, came up with two free round trip tix for himself and my daughter  so we decided she could play hookey and come with us on an Italian adventure.

If you have kids in school, even if they’re only in elementary school, this movie is worth your time. Hopefully you can set up a screening in your school district and have a meaningful community wide conversation afterward.