Parenting: Using Unstructured Time to Support Learning & Development

Last month I wrote a little bit about the adolescent’s struggle for control, and being up against a tidal wave of structure, constraint and constant management by outside forces.  Though I didn’t write at length about how this feeling translates to the classroom (and beyond), it most definitely does. 

Structure in the classroom is not a new thing, but what is new, is the lack of unstructured time built into the day.  Look around at your local school(s) and I’ll bet you’ll notice a decrease in recess and an increase in classroom time (yet another environment rife with competition.), mainly in the form of structured academia so that students can get a leg up in “the real world.” But there’s also something else going on I think, and that is the amount AND the pace at which schools/parents structure students’ time.  In other words, it seems like 90% of a typical student’s day is structured in some form or another.  Class time, recreation, after-school or extracurricular activities, homework, and sleep are all defined in neat blocks of time in order to keep up with the pace of learning these days.  I think parents have come to fear boredom because that often means kids aren’t learning (or doing) something.  Every bit of space, it seems, needs to be filled with something that will propel kids forward towards betterment. Carl Honore, in discussing his book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from Hyper-Parenting, states the following:

To me Slow Parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. They keep the family schedule under control so that everyone has enough downtime to rest, reflect and just hang out together. They accept that bending over backwards to give children the best of everything may not always be the best policy (because it denies them the much more useful life lesson of how to make the best of what they’ve got.)

There are, undoubtedly, kids who need more structure and attention. For example, children raised in poverty are less likely to achieve critical milestones than children who were never poor (Fottrell, 2015), and therefore, consideration of time and effort among these children must occur.  However, without ANY time to explore the world – which often occurs during periods of boredom – it stands to reason that kids are less likely to acquire experiences on their own, allowing them plenty of “trial and error” time so as to garner the self-empowerment needed to move ahead with confidence.  Over-structuring of time in order to hone the skills necessary to get ahead might, in fact, be doing a disservice to learning in general.  There’s very little time for kids to learn on their own, which might help explain the volume of “crises” that are being reported post-high school.

Written by Ann Kellogg, MS, LPC

References

Fottrell, Q.  (2015).  Five reasons kids in America are falling behind.  Retrieved from https://www.morningstar.com/news/market-watch/TDJNMW_2015091055/update-5-reasons-kids-in-america-are-falling-behind.html

Honore, C.  (2009). Under pressure: Rescuing our children from hyper-parenting.  San Francisco: HarperOne Publishers