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Unwinding the Kids
Why Children Need to Relax Too
By Mark Stackpole
How often do we complain about needing a break from our busy lives? Long workdays and weekends filled with household projects have become the norm. If there is any down time in the schedule, we spend it shuttling the kids to and from any one of a variety of sports practices or activities. With so many details to attend to, it can be easy for us to forget that our kids are also leading hectic lifestyles.
Even though they are doing fun stuff, kids need help balancing all of the different elements of their lives. So if we are feeling overwhelmed with all of the places that we have to be and all of the things that we have to do, perhaps our children are feeling the same way.
"Parents believe that their children should be kept busy and that they need to give their kids everything they can," says Mariaemma Pelullo-Willis, the co-author of Discover Your Child's Learning Style (Prima Lifestyles, 1999). "There is also the belief that being involved in lots of activities makes a child into a well-rounded person, which all parents want their child to be."
However, there is a limit to these good intentions. "If your child is booked every minute of every day, then that is not balance, even if he is doing 'good' things," she says. Pelullo-Willis also believes that parents need to look at their own schedules and work on simplifying their own lives and modeling the value of down time.
She advises families to establish a time for sharing, during which members of the family discuss their thoughts and feelings about their day, followed by a brief quiet time for each person to engage in a relaxing activity, perhaps reading or drawing. Given busy and variable family schedules, this allotted family time doesn't have to happen at the same time every day, just as long as it happens.