While touring a private middle school a few weeks ago, my husband and I noticed something: The students were fat. Not all of them, but enough to make us think about our choice to raise our children in the city.

The children in the elementary grades were skinny enough. But as we saw fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders, we couldn’t help commenting that as they were getting older, the kids were getting heavier and heavier.

According to the New York State Department of Health, obesity among children and adolescents in New York has tripled over the past three decades. A quarter of New York City schoolchildren between kindergarten and fifth grade are overweight, and close to a third of all New York City high-schoolers are overweight.

In this city, where a strong gust could blow some of the Pilates-crazed mothers down Park Avenue, why are so many children overweight?

“I grew up in New York,” said the school’s psychologist when we asked him about the issue, “and after school we used to go to the park and throw the ball around. Today, these kids all have tutors. They finish school, go to the tutor, come home and have dinner, and then it’s time for homework and bed.”

It sounds pretty depressing to me.

Unless you’re a tutor, of course, who these days makes somewhere in the range of $75 to $200 an hour, all off the books, thank you very much.

Poor nutrition and low activity levels are the most obvious reasons behind childhood obesity, but I can’t help but think that for many children in the city, whose parents know all about good nutrition and Little League on Saturday morning, the hours they spend sitting with tutors and in front of computers play a role as well.

When I typed the words “tutors in New York City” into Google’s search engine, there were 804,000 results. The number of results for the next four largest cities in America, when combined, doesn’t even come close to that number. When I replaced New York City with Los Angeles, there were 138,000 results. There were 190,000 for Chicago, 77,700 for Houston, and 88,900 for Philadelphia.

“There is so much pressure on our kids to be great at everything,” said a mother of two teenagers attending a tony private school. “When I was growing up, you were good at math or writing or French. It was okay to be bad at something, too. That was normal. Today, if your kid is bad at math, you immediately try to find the best math tutor to fix the problem. It doesn’t matter that she’s also a great writer and captain of the basketball team.”

Tutoring your son because he is failing French – sure. Tutoring your daughter because she has the worst math teacher, for the second year in a row – sure. But why is it such a problem if your child doesn’t get all As? Isn’t there a natural variance in our children’s performance? Don’t the high schools and colleges expect a range of abilities in each child?

It’s the parents that are behind the tutoring rage. If I hear one more baby boomer tell me that the college process is so much more competitive these days, I think I’ll scream. I’m sure it is more intense than it used to be. But I’m also sure that the intensity, in part, mirrors the madness of these parents.

“You can’t believe how nasty some of the parents get,” said another mother with a teenager at one of the private high schools in Riverdale. “On one side of their mouth, they complain about how hard their kids have to work, and out the other, they’re busting their ass, trying to convince the ‘it’ tutor to squeeze the kid into his schedule.”

And what if you can’t afford the tutor solution? Our whiz kids, who spend far too much time in front of the computer to begin with, have other resources that cost far less than $100 an hour.

“The math help you need and deserve!” declared one of the many sites I found among the 804,000. “College math professor with 12 years experience in helping students. Want help with homework? More free time? Higher marks? A better understanding of math? Read on. I can help you get all of these! How? First select any problem or problems you need extra help with. Send me the entire problem. I’ll return a complete explanation with all work as well as the answer. All questions received by 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday will receive an answer by 7 a.m. the following day. All questions sent by 4 p.m. Saturday will receive an answer by 7 a.m. Monday. Payment must accompany or precede questions. Current prices: $2.75 for one one-part problem. $22.50 for 10 one-part problems.”

Yikes! Doesn’t that sound a lot like cheating? But in this environment, we have come to accept these kinds of options as justified in the name of leveling the playing field. There are hundreds of online tutors in all sorts of subjects ranging from Cantonese to chemistry.

If we parents are honest about our desire for our children to have less pressure on them, to have a childhood more like the ones we enjoyed, to throw the ball around, have more free time, spend less time in front of the computer, and less time stressing about school work and getting into college, then it is up to us – not the colleges – to stop putting so much pressure on our children. And it’s up to us to stop expecting our children to be great at everything, rather than hiring tutors when there is the first sign of weakness.

It is, after all, a free market. And only when the demand decreases for high-priced tutors will the supply follow suit.