Downtime is Important for Kids, Even with a Busy Schedule

• Children often participate in many different extracurricular activities while growing up.
• Children’s activities can cause unhappiness when they feel pressured to achieve certain metrics.
• It is important for parents to recognize when a child loses interest in an activity and allow downtime.

Whether it’s taking a child to theater practice, karate class, or both, after school activities It can be time consuming for both children and parents.

While after school activities can be a great place make friends and when exploring new interests, it is important that these structured activities do not completely occupy the child’s schedule.

Clinical child psychologist Erica Fener Sitkoff and Boston College research professor Peter Gray spoke to Business Insider about the importance of free time for children; even for children who seem to thrive on a busy work schedule. extracurricular activities.

Check your child’s feelings towards their activities

It can be difficult to tell if your child’s activities, or even a particular activity, are becoming overwhelming and need more rest. However, be careful, control and eliminate some stress is a good place to start.

While your child may naturally thrive in structured activities, parents need to do the same. relieve pressure aims to reach a certain level of success in its activities.

“There’s a difference between exposing kids to a lot of things so they understand what they gravitate towards and what they’re good at,” Fener Stikoff said. “It’s one thing to have them do a lot of things and be the best at them all,” she adds, a pressure that can take the fun out of activities for some kids.

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It’s also important to find out how your child feels about the structured activities he or she is already involved in. One way to do this is to become aware of more subtle activities. changes in their attitudes for its activities.

“My advice to parents is, if your child doesn’t want it or doesn’t remember that today is so-and-so activity day, then don’t take your child to that activity,” Gray said. “If your child wants it, then that’s fine. There’s no value in getting your child involved in an activity they don’t want to do.”

Fener Sitkoff agreed that it was important to note this point. child’s interest in activities However, it is recommended that you contact them directly.

“Continue to check in with your child and say: Do you still love him/her? What do you like about it? Is there anything you don’t like about this?” Fener Sitkoff said:

Rest time is key to the child’s overall well-being

Interruption and school activities are not mutually exclusive. It is imperative that a child who participates in any activity, even if it is an activity he/she enjoys, finds time to prioritize his/her free time in general. health and development.

Fener Sitkoff told Business Insider that interruptions encourage creative thinking: problem solvingreflection and independence.

“If you think about the time when kids are on their own, creating their own experiences, They learn self-confidence“It’s like they’re using it themselves. They learn independence and decision-making. Then, when they’re with their peers, when they have unstructured free time, they work on their social skills on how to work collaboratively with others,” Fener Sitkoff said.

While we may think of downtime as something we have to keep to a routine, child’s schedule among its other activities, it plays an important role that should be considered more than an afterthought.

“It’s funny that we even call this an outage,” Gray told Business Insider. “Children are designed to do child things. play, exploreand follow their interests. They are not designed to take part in all these adult-directed activities. It’s true that we call it interruption now, as if they were giving up other things they were doing, but that must be childhood. That should be what they do in the first place.”

Let your child determine what their free time looks like

We all have different ideas about what downtime looks like in practice. May mean downtime for some kids catching up on a book only; For others, this might mean playing a new video game they want to try.

Fener Sitkoff suggested parents to come to the center idea of ​​balance while evaluating their children’s leisure time interests.

“When parents plan and dictate free time, you don’t create that emotion. agency and autonomy in a young person. On the other hand, if you do not provide any structure, you will allow a young person who has not had all the life experiences you have to direct himself,” said Fener Sitkoff.

For example, if your child wants to spend his free time using technologyyou can let them do it, but as Stikoff suggests, help them create guidelines for how long to use it. This might look like letting your child spend 30 minutes playing digital games instead of more than four hours.

Even if you provide guidelines for how much time your child will spend on certain forms of leisure, Gray recommends that parents allow their children to spend free time alone or with other children, but not always in the presence of adults.

“Children have to get away from adults. It’s not even playing if there’s an adult there telling you what to do,” Gray said.

Structured after-school activities can certainly benefit children’s lives, but prioritizing your child’s ability to spend free time in the way they choose is an important aspect of their development.