Buried in a small-town Alberta newspaper, in a syndicated health column from the Canadian Medical Association, sits a piece of parenting advice that reads like it was written yesterday by a child psychologist warning about over-scheduled kids. The column, edited by Dr. Grant Fleming, Associate Secretary of the CMA, takes direct aim at what he calls the "extras" — the music lessons, dancing classes, and enrichment activities that wealthier families layer onto childhood.

Fleming's argument is almost startlingly modern:

"We think of the children whose parents are economically able to give them opportunities to study music, dancing, et cetera, as being the lucky ones. They may be, but sometimes the 'extras' are anything but good for them... it is even more desirable that the child have sufficient time for play and an abundance of rest, together with ample opportunity to do the things which he wants to do."

He goes further, drawing a direct line between under-rested children and what he calls a "whole train of undesirable physical and mental conditions":

"Children require sufficient rest, and yet more children are deprived of this essential than suffer from other physical needs. Lack of rest leads to malnutrition, irritability and a whole train of undesirable physical and mental conditions. Play is just as necessary for the child as is food. Play implies doing what the child wants to do, not what someone else considers he should do."

And then the sharpest line — a critique of well-meaning, over-controlling parents that could have come from any contemporary book on childhood development:

"Parents with the best of intentions set out to plan the lives of their children. They may feel that they want to protect them against the difficulties which they themselves had to face. They have forgotten, or else they never knew, that if their child is to be a healthy happy adult, he must grow up in the sense of becoming independent, able to stand on his own feet, and to face the difficulties of life as they come along."

Was he ahead of his time? Remarkably so. Modern developmental research has converged exactly on Fleming's intuition. Peter Gray's work on the decline of free play, the American Academy of Pediatrics' 2018 clinical report declaring play "essential to development," and Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book The Anxious Generation all make the same argument Fleming made in a Wainwright newspaper in December 1935: that self-directed, unsupervised, unstructured play is not a luxury — it is a developmental nutrient, and depriving children of it produces measurable harm.

What's striking is the economic framing. Fleming was writing in the depths of the Depression, and he specifically warns that the children of affluent parents may be the disadvantaged ones — because affluence buys "extras" that crowd out the rest and play that are genuinely essential. The modern equivalent — the resume-padded suburban kid shuttled between travel soccer and Kumon — would have been instantly recognizable to him.