“What are we going to do today?” pleads the child as he climbs into the car after a full day of school.  What is that about?  Is it that the child has come to expect that every day brings a new form of parent-organized, post school entertainment – music lessons, sports lessons, art classes, dance classes, “enrichment” classes, and playdates?  And I wonder if maybe, in our mission to make sure our children don’t miss one minute of mind and body improvement, we are forgetting the  importance of doing nothing.

“Doing nothing” is not that at all. Experts tell us that unstructured time is vital for children’s development cognitively, emotionally, physically, and even socially. Peter Sheras, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, says “Children need [unstructured time] to recuperate from the more structured part of their day and to just veg out.”  The chance to recharge their batteries that unstructured time allows is a crucial part of child development.  “When children amuse themselves, they’re actually exercising a different part of their brain than when they’re engaged in an organized activity, “ says Dan Rees, PhD at Western Maryland College. “They grow emotionally and intellectually; kids who have ample opportunity to make up their own rules and fantasies are cognitively way ahead of those whose time is always structured.”

Children need time to process and practice what they learn during the structured times, formal activities, even the socializing of their day.  They need time to use creatively the new skills they learn from teachers, coaches, and friends.  They need space and time to try out that which they simply observe others doing. It’s kind of like microwave cooking.  After something cooks in the microwave, it has a “standing time.”  The learning goes on and on, long after the direct instruction time.  When we have our children’s days completely programmed, either with extracurricular classes or with parent-generated activities, when is the standing time?

Children’s days need “unplanning.” Our children have become so reliant on others for stimulation, they don’t know how to entertain themselves.  Doing nothing encourages children to be resourceful. Some parents fear that children, left to their own devices, will become bored. Some parents feel that any activity that doesn’t seem to lead in some measurable way to advancement or direct results is not a good use of time. So, in their zeal to give their child every opportunity to learn, they are robbing them of something much more valuable, the growth that comes from doing nothing.

Maybe it’s time to get busy doing nothing.

I heard a radio advertisement this week for a DVD , Your Baby Can Read, or some name like that.  Needless to say, it grabbed my attention.  This program promises to teach your toddler, even infant, to read.  A mother of a three year old claimed that she had been using it for a year, and now her child was reading on a third grade level.  Please save me from being sick!  It took everything in my body not to drive off the road…as I seethed.

 Why on earth does anyone want her toddler (or infant) to read?

 Then I saw in the newspaper today that Docia Zavitkovsky had died.  Docia, a matriarch in our field, dedicated her entire 96 year life to young children, to raising consciousness about the importance of our children’s early years as the foundation for a rich and satisfying life. She was the founding mother of Play Matters, a nonprofit organization that places play at the heart of early childhood. What would Docia have said about this advertisement? I shudder to think.

 I am not sure which part of the radio advertisement bothers me the most…that parents are pushing their children in the exact wrong direction? That parents are so competitive in today’s world that they are taking desperate measures to give their children a perceived advantage that can actually be a disadvantage?  That merchants and advertisers are taking advantage of naive parents, making money off of them? It all bothers me.

It reminds me of Baby Einstein. The inventor made a fortune off of all those parents who were convinced that pouring images into their infants and toddlers via a screen would actually make them smart. Have you all thrown out those DVD’s yet…or better, asked for a refund?

 How do you grow a child?  Our very youngest children are nourished by interacting with people and with their environment. They learn and grow by feeding the right hemisphere of their brains with sensory and emotional and social experiences, through interacting with all that they encounter in their world. Learning in the early months and years of life is about play, exploration, trial and error.  It is priming the pump, laying the foundation for learning to read and other left brain experiences at the right time, and that is much later. How interesting it is that you can teach a toddler to recognize a word by repeated (boring) exposures to that word, over and over and over. But show him that word when he is six years old, and he’ll have in a minute or two.  And to top it off, he’ll even know what the word means!

 Would it be too evil of me to cross my fingers that Baby Can Read is a total flop? I pray, for Docia’s sake, that not one more DVD is sold.