A smackerel of fun
Whatever happened to just doin' nuffin'? Tom Dusevic fears the mania for keeping kids busy is producing dull conformists with great CVs, but empty souls.
The hours of the day that children spend out of school, away from homework and organised sports, are, to borrow a phrase from the grown-up world, known as down time - being idle, killing time or playing with other kids. The essence of "goofing off", as the kids on American TV shows would say, or in Australian vernacular, "doin' nuffin'".
I want to make a small case for the return of this special time, where kids have moments to make up their own minds, deal with their problems, dream about what they want to be and make their first steps into the adult world.
Of course, such idleness is precisely what today's middle-class conventional parenting wisdom warns against. Kids have to be kept busy, stimulated at all times, watched closely and controlled. Lurking on the streets are all sorts of distractions, temptations and threats, we are told. Fill their day with activities, make them swim character-building laps, and for God's sake keep them in the house.
It's part of the desire to build a superkid: identify their genius early, build up their résumés, get them into the best schools, spend lots of dough on educational toys and tutors. For whatever reason, we are over-scheduling our children's lives and they are getting busier.
A few years ago, one of my colleagues in America interviewed a 12-year-old boy. This is his world: He wakes at 6am every weekday, downs a five-minute breakfast, reports to school at 7.50am, returns home at 3.15pm, hits the books from 5pm to 9pm (with a break for dinner) and goes to sleep at 10.30pm. Saturdays are little better: from 9am to 5pm
he attends a prep program in the hope of getting a scholarship to a private school. Then there are piano lessons and a couple of hours of practice a week.
If he's lucky he'll squeeze in his friends on Sunday. "Sometimes I think, like, since I'm a kid, I need to enjoy my life," he says. "But I don't have time for that."
According to a much-cited study of children's time-use, conducted in 1997 by researchers at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, many American kids, regardless of income or ethnicity, are like the 12-year-old. Comparing those results with a similar study done in 1981, researchers found children (aged three to 12) were spending more time in school and in organised sport and activities.
They found that children's leisure time - that is, time left over after sleeping, eating, personal hygiene and attending school or day care - dropped from 40 per cent of the day to 25 per cent. The time children spent playing dropped by 16 per cent between 1981 and 1997. I'm not aware of similar studies in Australia but I suspect there's been a general movement in this direction here: children today are on the sorts of schedules that will make them unhappy little slaves to work.
Childhood was once a time to learn, grow, play and make mistakes. But in many cases, kids are serving apprenticeships for adulthood.
There's a consensus among scholars who talk about the importance of playtime. According to T. Berry Brazelton, a Harvard pediatrician: "Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself." As Brazelton argues, unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers.
The Michigan study found kids aged three to 12 were spending a mere 12 hours a week engaged in it. "If we don't pay attention to this," Brazelton said, "we're going to create obsessive-compulsive people." Play deprivation can lead to a lot of dull, angry, depressed and unhealthy Jacks and Jills.
Play refreshes and stimulates young minds. Moreover, play can actually make children smarter. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, told Time earlier this year that today's mania for raising little Einsteins might have destroyed the real Einstein, a notorious dreamer who earned poor grades in school but somewhere in his frolics divined the formula for the relationship between matter and energy.
Yet even when children are allowed time to play these days, it's often indoors with machines, in front of a screen, which limits their chances for exploration and interaction with others. A family friend in her 60s who migrated back to Croatia 20 years ago told me during her latest visit to Australia that the biggest change she noticed about Sydney was that children had disappeared from the streets of the suburbs in the afternoons.
The streets were quiet; no kids on bikes, even in the part of northern Sydney where Ivanka once lived, which many people fondly refer to as the "Bible belt". Some of the reasons for this are that mums are working, children are in after-school care or in organised activities, the streets are busier with traffic, there are fewer vacant lots to play in. There may even be fewer kids around - there's no doubt that fertility rates are down - so there's less critical mass for children to organise themselves and achieve some relative safety in numbers.
Looking back, the 1970s, for a lot of reasons, can seem pretty good to a white, middle-class suburban dad on the verge of middle age. I grew up in the multicultural western suburbs. My mates and I lived a reasonably carefree existence; our hard-working parents took little direct interest in how we spent our free time, as long as we were home for dinner.
We organised backyard Test cricket matches and mini-Olympics; we explored the stormwater canals for miles in every direction; we wrestled, we built cubby houses, we played handball and tennis on the road; every kind of mobile contraption, bike, scooter and billycart became a menace on the footpath; when we got into our teens, we sat on fences or in the gutter till late on summer nights listening to music or telling stories; we ate hot chips and watched 16-year-old Greek gods play pinball.
We had fights, blood feuds and arguments over girlfriends. We devised ways to share what we had (but never girlfriends), how to solve disputes and how best to use our goofing-off time together. There was school and all that went with that. But there was also the neighbourhood, which offered protection, fun, freedom and, importantly, boredom. During school holidays we did not look to our parents to bring out those wussy activity books, or to take us to Noosa. We somehow learned to get along and make decisions.
As this childhood vanishes, so, too, does the free time of young adulthood. A recent survey of Macquarie University students found that increasing levels of paid work by students was destroying their social and community life. Statistics lecturer Michael Petersons found that more than two-thirds of the 3,500 economics and finance students he surveyed performed paid work; the average amount of time spent working was 20.5 hours a week.
"The nature of university life has changed," said Petersons. "Students sacrifice their social life at university and the collegiality that full-time students have traditionally enjoyed, as they now go straight from class to work. While there is a slight effect on grades it is not as dramatic as you might expect. Students tend to manage their study life reasonably well but lose out on everything else. Now the notion of students getting together outside of classes is almost non-existent," Petersons told the Macquarie University News.
American author David Brooks, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly earlier this year, set out to document the consequences of raising educational thoroughbreds. He spent time on the Princeton University campus and observed students whom he found to be gifted, disciplined and driven to succeed. These students were professionals who made appointments to see their best friends and who, in many ways, were boring.
"At the schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics but the Organisation Kid," wrote Brooks, echoing William H. Whyte's term for the 1950s American archetype.
"If they are group-oriented, deferential to authority, and achievement-obsessed, it is because we achievement-besotted adults have trained them to be. We have devoted our prodigious energies to imposing a sort of order and responsibility on our kids' lives that we never experienced ourselves. The kids have looked upon this order and have decided that it's good," wrote Brooks.
These are the fast-track graduates of the Michigan time-use study. Young adults with terrific résumés and empty souls. The spirit to try things and fail is missing, Brooks found. I've seen the Australian version of these Organisational Kids while covering the election campaign: they're breathtaking to behold, incredibly focused, smarter than I ever felt, but they're also a little sad.
How do you turn back the clock? And should we? Would any of us really want to go back to those days? Or be game enough to take away our children's TVs or confiscate their modems and Nintendos? I don't think it's about returning to Nirvana Avenue, circa 1969. To the contrary, there are lots of things that can be done to give children back their goofing-off time without depriving them of all the wonderful things that are available to them in 2001.
We can spend more time playing with them and less time working to buy gadgets; we can be less paranoid about the dangers on the street or less scared that if they don't get the right tutoring they'll never make it to business school; we can fix up their environment by providing more open space in our cities, control the flow and speed of traffic on suburban streets and encourage our children to make friends in their neighbourhood.
And no, the answer is not some Pleasantville, or gated community. Those places can only prepare you to live in another gated community. The answer lies in somehow taking the pressure off kids. They should be allowed to make some choices and suffer the consequences. At the heart of goofing off is the development of a child's spirit. Rather than trying too hard to create a perfect adult with terrific career prospects, we might achieve more by trying to restore the best parts of that wonderland we used to know as childhood.
For inspiration, we could do worse than listening to Winnie-the-Pooh:
Now there comes a time in everyone's life when toys and games are replaced by pencils and books. You see Christopher Robin was going away to school. Nobody in the forest knew exactly why or where he was going, all they knew was that it had something to do with twice times and ABCs and where a place called Brazil is.
"Pooh, what do you like doing best in the world?"
"What I like best is me going to visit you and you saying, 'How about a smackerel of honey?'"
"I like that too, but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?"
"Well it's when grown-ups ask, 'What are you going to do?' and you say 'Nothing'. And you go and do it."
"I like that, let's do it all the time."
"You know something Pooh, I'm not going to do just Nothing anymore."
"You mean never again?"
"Well, not so much."
Tom Dusevic is deputy editor of Time, Australia. This article is based on a lecture given at a forum on the future of leisure at the University of Technology, Sydney.
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