I love the idea of Children’s Week. It is a national celebration of children’s rights, talents and citizenship, held in the last week of October to coincide with Universal Children’s Day. Each year the theme of Children’s Week highlights a particular Children’s Right. This year, the theme was based on The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 31, and was summed up as Children have the right to relax, play and to join in a wide range of leisure activities.
This theme is music to my ears. I’ll break it down and explain why something so simple is so important. The right to relax; if you aren’t currently raising kids, it might seem like this is an unnecessary statement. But any of us in the business of raising kids know that they (and we) struggle to get enough relax time. Little ones in daycare have very long and full days and while they might have naps, they get very little relax time in such busy environments. School-aged kids’ days are spent trying to cover every aspect of an over-crowded curriculum, with so much pressure to meet standardised testing in addition to all the other activities that there is barely time to exhale (for teachers too). Many teens have sports, work and disproportionate amounts of homework to complete in their “relax” time after days, weeks and months of school which is socially and educationally challenging. Their unrelenting use of social media means that many have no disconnection and true rest time.
A lack of rest and relaxation is a sure way to build stressed, tired, emotionally fraught and socially disconnected (in real life) kids. Quiet time (sometimes identified from the cries of “I’m bored!”) is vital in supporting good mental health, boosting creativity, increasing productivity (which for kids, is learning), promoting wellbeing, reducing stress and improving mood.
Given enough time to relax and recover, kids will naturally move into play. The type of play that benefits kids most is unstructured outdoor play. Essentially, it’s free play outside of restrictive walls. Outdoor unstructured play provides opportunity for kids to use their imaginations, move their bodies in big and bold ways and enjoy all the physical and wellbeing benefits of fresh air, sunshine and nature. With these benefits being supported by scientific research and quite widely known, I wonder why we feel the need to fill kids’ days to bursting point and shower them with so many toys and gadgets? There is no evidence to suggest that this is a good idea.
One of my favourite thinkers, Glennon Doyle, asks why we want our kids to do everything and have the best of everything. There is certainly no scientific evidence to suggest that this is good for kids, and I struggle to think of a single example of an adult who had the best of everything and turned out to be the best kind of person. Kids who don’t get the chance to imagine much don’t build strong empathetic skills. They become adults who can’t imagine what it would be like to walk in someone else’s shoes and instead of being empathetic, are more likely to blame others for their less-fortunate circumstances when their own fortunate circumstances have usually resulted from good fortune, nepotism, intergenerational wealth and disproportionate opportunity and privilege.
So then, what if we decided that successful parenting was more about all kids having enough and not just about our kids having the most and best of everything? What if we decided that one important and effective way to love our kids is to let them rest, relax, imagine, and sometimes not do everything and get everything? What if we decided that to support this imagination-building, we’d give them gifts that fostered imagination and creativity, rather than repetitive use of a toy that was been designed to do only what it does? What if we gave gifts like art supplies and big pieces of fabric, musical instruments, wood, clay, real working tools and sand patches? What if we gave fewer gifts, but to more children – outside of our family? As Glennon Doyle asks, what if we used our love less like a laser on our own biological children and more like the sun, shining on all kids? And what if we told our kids why that was – explained our relative good fortune and collective responsibility to make sure all kids get a great childhood? What if this festive season we gave our kids the gift of rest, relaxation, play and leisure, and did what we could to make sure all kids got the same – got to experience the things that Australia committed to as part of an international agreement in acknowledgment of what are fundamental rights of every child?