Moms & Dads Talk: The Value of Unstructured Time

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a hefty load weighing my mail and email boxes–brochures for camp, sign ups for fall sports. I am, admittedly, a parent who gets anxiety over missing deadlines, regretting missed opportunities, and so the seeming urgency of these messages does weigh on me. But when I take a second to back up I have to remind myself that I am a mother to an 8 and 7-year- old.  What, in the life of these two young children, could really be that urgent?

A friend recently recommended the Atlantic’s article Leave Those Kids Alone.  In it, the author reviews Robert Paul Smith’s 1957 reissued bestseller, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. Smith recounts an idyllic childhood marked by transforming stones into an axe-head or fossil, days devoid of adult interference and the endless search for magic. He writes, “A kid needs time to lie on his back…enough downtime to be bored, yes–bored enough to stare at the sky and study imperfections in his own eyeball. That’s what makes for a childhood worth remembering for the whole of one’s life.”

The article goes on to analyze the changing face of today’s childhood in its support of Smith’s idyllic view. Reading it, I am forced to reconsider the urgency of these pleas to register for camp, sign up for sports and add a weekend art class. With each form I complete and check I tear off, I seem to chip at an essential piece of my children’s childhoods–the very time to be free of school, of homework, even of me.

My husband, who grew up on a farm in Baltimore County, recalls a Tom Sawyer-like childhood marked by shoeless days playing in the stream with his dog and jumping from the hayloft with his sisters. He also remembers padding his sister up in makeshift armor and “shooting” lacrosse balls at her. He reasons that it improved his accuracy and toughened her up to later play Division 1 athletics.

As we have our annual argument over who will do the transporting of our children to and from weeknight soccer practice or riding lessons, he draws on his childhood to support Smith’s very argument–there will be a time for all of these activities and at a certain point in their lives, we will all surrender to the endless activity schedule. But for now, while they are young, let them be kids.