Downtime is important for children even with busy schedules

• As children grow up, they often participate in many different extracurricular activities.
• Children’s activities can cause unhappiness when they feel pressure to achieve certain milestones.
• It is important for parents to notice when a child is losing interest in an activity and allow him to rest.

Whether it’s a child’s trip to theater practice, karate class, or both, extracurricular activities can be time-consuming for both children and parents.

Although extracurricular activities can be a great place to make friends and discover new interests, it is important that these structured activities do not completely take over the child’s schedule.

Erica Fehner Sitkoff, a clinical child psychologist, and Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, spoke to Business Insider about the importance of downtime for kids—even those who seem to thrive on a full schedule of classes. extracurricular activities.

Talk to your child about his feelings about activities.

It can be difficult to tell if your child’s activities, or even a specific activity, have become tiresome and if they need more time to rest. But being observant, checking and relieving some of the stress this is a good place to start.

Although your child may naturally excel in structured activities, parents need to relieve pressure around achieving a certain level of success in one’s activities.

“There’s a difference between giving kids a lot of interesting things so they can figure out what they’re drawn to and what they’re good at,” Fener Stikoff said. “It’s another thing to force them to do a lot of things and be the best at all those things,” adding that such pressure can take the enjoyment out of some children’s activities.

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It is also important to ask your child how he feels about structured activities in which he is already participating. One way to do this is to notice more subtle changes in their attitude to your activities.

“My recommendation to parents is that if your child doesn’t ask for it or doesn’t remember that today is the day for such and such an activity, don’t take them to it,” Gray said. “If your child wants it, then that’s good. There’s no point in involving your child in an activity they don’t enjoy.”

Fener Sitkoff agreed that it is important to consider your child’s interest in activities but I recommended checking with them directly.

“Keep discussing with your child: ‘Do you still like this? What do you like about it? Is there anything you don’t like about it?” Fener Sitkoff said.

Downtime is key to a child’s overall well-being

Downtime and schoolwork are not mutually exclusive. It is critical that a child participating in any activity, even one they enjoy, still takes the time to prioritize their downtime for their general activities. health and development.

Fener Sitkoff told Business Insider that downtime stimulates creative thinking. problem solvingreflection and independence.

“If you think about when children are left to their own devices and create their own experiences, they learn confidence“,” Fener Sitkoff said. “It’s like they’re driving the car themselves. They’re learning independence and decision-making. Then, when they’re with peers and have unstructured downtime, they’re working on their social skills of working with others.”

Although we may think of downtime as something we have to fit into child’s schedule Among their other activities, it plays a key role that should be recognized as more than just an afterthought.

“It’s funny that we even call it downtime,” Gray told Business Insider. “Children are meant to do childish things. They are created to play, exploreand follow their interests. They are not meant to participate in all of these adult-led activities. It’s true that now we call it downtime, as if they’re giving up everything else they’re doing, but it must be that it’s childhood. That should be what they do first.”

Let your child set the tone for what their downtime will look like.

We all have different ideas about what downtime looks like in practice. For some children, downtime may mean I’m studying a book one; for others, it might mean the opportunity to play a new video game they’ve been wanting to try.

Fener Sitkoff recommended the center to parents idea of ​​balance taking into account their participation in the downtime of their children.

“When parents schedule and dictate downtime, you don’t create feelings Agency and Autonomy from a young man. On the other hand, if you don’t provide any structure, you’re allowing a young person who doesn’t have all the life experiences you’ve had to guide you,” Fener Sitkoff said.

For example, if your child wants to spend some downtime using technologyyou can allow them to do it, but help them develop guidelines for how long they’ll use it, recommended Stikoff. This might look like allowing your child to spend 30 minutes playing digital games rather than more than four hours.

Even if you make recommendations about how long your child should engage in certain recreational activities, Gray recommends parents allow their children to vacation alone or with other children, but not always with adults present.

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

Structured after-school activities can definitely benefit children, but making it a priority to rest in whatever way your child chooses is a key aspect of their development.