Just reading "The Price of Privilege" by a psychiatrist and these sentences struck a chord with some of the pushy parents I have encountered of late:
"Raising children has come to look more like a business endeavour and less like an endeavour of the heart. We are overly concerned with what our children 'do' rather than with who are children 'are'...Between accelerated academic courses, multiple extra-curricular activities, premature preparation for high school or college, special coaches and tutors engaged to wring the last bit of performance out of them, many kids find themselves scheduled to within an inch of their lives."
BUT it is actually really tempting to fill your DKs' days with loads of interesting, healthy, challenging, stimulating etc. things to do, but I am glad to have found confirmation for my suspicion that it can do more harm than good. There are plenty of parents round here who fill their DKs' every waking hour with some kind of tuition or activity and scurry them round from music class to supplemental lessons to football practice to drama group to dance class. If the author is right and you don't give them plenty of autonomous time to "discover themselves", learn from their own mistakes etc. you're more likely to make them depressed and lacking in a sense of their own identity as adolescents and adults.