I recently rediscovered a small piece I had read quite a while ago by the writer Anna Quindlen entitled “Doing Nothing Is Something.” In it she made an impassioned case for children having time in the summer to do nothing. As she wrote, free time during the summer “was the making of me, as a human being and a writer. Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky… There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call ‘doing nothing’ is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call.”
As adults we’re often reluctant to allow kids much unstructured time, time we fear may devolve into boredom, trouble, or danger. We can too easily think that free time is wasted time, and that we’re not doing our jobs as parents if we’re not offering our children “enriching” opportunities at every moment. But kids need healthy doses of down time during which they can do nothing, play in unstructured ways free from adult direction, explore, mess around outside, and let their minds and activities wander. They can benefit from having to figure out how to keep themselves occupied, interested, and engaged, from wrestling to discover their interests, and from freeing themselves from immediate gratification or technologically driven distraction. The habits of mind that they can develop in the process can further their cognitive and creative skills, their ability to act independently, their capacity to persevere, and their focus on a task at hand.
I am not saying that kids should go through the summer with no structure at all or that all structure is bad. After all, as a school we do assign meaningful reading, writing, and math work to keep those skills fresh and to ensure that less critical material is lost. But balance is the key. Ultimately, by allowing children to figure out how to use free time, we can help them learn some important life and learning skills and expand their horizons. Perhaps most important of all, we can let kids be kids, an increasingly precious luxury in a society that seems to demand that young people become multi-talented and hyper-proficient at ever earlier ages.
Happy summer to you and your family!