Several friends were waxing rhapsodic recently about magical childhood summers filled with endless hours of freedom to strike up stickball games, read the entire series of Sweet Valley High books and chase fireflies. But when talk turned to our offspring, it was clear that their summers are more continuations of the frantic, jampacked school year: Spanish and music camps, tutoring sessions, sports clinics and so on. And the one mother who had decided to plan no activities whatsoever was complaining that she started hearing whines of “I’m booooored” just days after school ended.
So as summer heads toward its midpoint, what advice do experts provide about the best use of this time off? Finding a point somewhere between the extremes of imposing structure and providing much-needed downtime seems to be the key to a happy, health break for all.
“Summer is the time to slow down a little bit and take it easy — to help over-programmed kids develop their imagination, creativity and their own sense of initiative, instead of just being ferried from one activity to the next,” says Potomac child psychiatrist Michael Brody. He points out that the benefits of unstructured play include learning to work out conflicts and developing motor control and language skills. “I’m not saying that children should be raised by wolves — they have to come in for dinner, someone has to know where they are and there are obviously other safety issues — but there should be less of a leash.”
Of course, the reality is that many mothers and fathers work and need their children to be in day care, camp or other supervised settings all day, so there are fewer children who can engage in unstructured play with one another. And not every neighborhood is safe to explore without adult supervision. “Because of the way things are these days, parents have to plan more for activities than they did 30 years ago, when you could just send your child outside and there would be a group of kids playing in the street ,” says Lisa Efron, a psychologist at Children’s National Medical Center.
Compounding the problem is that many youngsters don’t quite know what to do with an unscheduled afternoon — or week. “Kids today have almost no free time during the school year, and then, all of a sudden during the summer they may have 14 hours a day to fill, which is a big jump,” says Nancy Darling, a professor of psychology at Ohio’s Oberlin College who studies parent-child relationships. She notes potential negative consequences to all that unscheduled time, such as a well-documented rise in underage drinking, marijuana use and smoking during the summer months.
“Learning to figure out what you like and don’t like to do and to develop hobbies to keep yourself entertained, that’s a skill, and an essential one, as you get older.” she explains, “But kids may need help figuring out how to do that — some more than others.” Darling offers some tips to help parents provide just enough — but not too much — assistance and structure in this process:
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