Career and Kids

Do not count on research when raising your kids

by mike on October 10th, 2006

Yesterday, I introduced you to Inside Fatherhood and pointed out his article about a study indicating that kids need less scheduled play time.  It sounds like great advice, especially since parents always feel stressed trying to coordinate all the activities.

Just today I found another study arguing that kids involved in organized activities “benefit developmentally. They are healthier, more competent than other children, better adjusted, less prone to antisocial behaviour and function better in the classroom.”

That sounds great.  I need to call the rec center and re-enroll the kids in the classes I pulled them out of after reading yesterday’s study.

This is the potential problem of these studies.  Each new study contradicts the last.  As parents, we have to filter through the contradictions and think about how the decisions that we make are going to benefit our children.

Each child is different.  Each family is different.

Did you know that on average parents are spending 4 times as much time with their kids as they did in 1975?  That is bound to be a good thing.  We can get more involved with our kids lives and help them with their challenges much more readily than our parents did, right?  The author of that article thinks:

Most children probably don’t benefit much from having their parents breathing down their necks for 99 minutes a day, channelling Lego building sessions into the foundations for a future career in architecture. They want to be able to look up from their storybook and ask Mum what a word means or to make Dad laugh with a joke they heard at school. They want their parents to be around and available when they want them, not pencilled in for formalised doses of parent-child time.

Between work and those 99 minutes with the kids, when do parents get any time for themselves.  Perhaps we should sit down on the couch with the newspaper a little more often and let the kids come to us.

Whether you choose to hyper schedule or free play, it seems like maybe the best thing we can do is sit back and enjoy watching the kids play once in a while.  Kids are going to be creative and have fun wherever they are as long as the parents do not micromanage the actual event itself.

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