While our 2020 outreach for school and work and socializing is enabled by ultramodern vehicles of communication, when the day is done and school is out, the media silenced, and there are no places to go off to in our cars, there is a kind of time available that we haven’t had since we were kids or maybe since my generation were kids.
Unless a child’s downtime in the after-school hours is spent largely on “screen time”, the day has a surfeit of time/opportunity in the absence of all the running around of our “normal” lives: lessons and errands and playdates, etc. This time can be a challenge to families as they try to “keep kids busy” but I believe it can be an opportunity as well… after an initial period of adjustment. Admittedly, I am not on the front lines with you guys - at home with active kids right now, but I have been and this I know: Kids don’t have to be kept busy all the time. As long as they have resources available, they will find their way to a new pace and I predict it will be beneficial. For the past few decades, psychologists have advised that modern children are “hurried children*” compared to those of a few decades ago, hurried and more anxious. Immersion in face time with gadgets has been gradually devouring increasing amounts of face time with families, play time, time outdoors, time to daydream, and so much more.
We all know that Doing Something includes required things like, for me as a child, chores, piano, homework (we had very little in those days) and so forth. But it can also mean doing things like playing either an official or pickup game of basketball, or running a race or playing Monopoly. It could be going to the circus or blueberry picking. Required or voluntary, the activities in this category are more formal, designed. When asked, “What are you doing?” the answer is definitive. “I am going to the movies.” If you were pitching cards just to watch them scatter, the answer would be a dreamy, “Nothing.” Playing Chinese Checker is something. Rolling marbles helter skelter observing how they move is not.
Nothing To Do is what happens when kids are in a holding pattern in an environment devoid of exciting stimulation. For me, it was visiting adult friends of our parents and having to sit still and behave, quietly; church; long car rides- all car rides were long to me then. Waiting. A kid’s mind can be active when still, but just for so long. When asked, “What are you doing?” here, the answer is a whine. “There’s nothing to do here.”
Doing Nothing includes all the pleasures children have during time not committed to the tasks or routines required by grownups and/or without formal design. Running for the sheer joy of it, or skipping companionably along with one’s own shadow. Noticing you have a shadow at all. Kicking a pebble down the walk and skipping it into a stream. Picking a ripe black raspberry on the way to a friend’s house. Observing. Pondering.
Obviously, I am fondly reminiscent here. But that was childhood as I recall it. We stayed at home, mostly, like now, and we had nothing to fill the moments between required activities except our curiosity, imagination and one another. Day after long day, time passed slowly but every minute was filled. I think we have a seize-the-moment opportunity, right now, to ease off the busyness treadmill and let kids find their own “somethings” to do and watch what happens when they are Doing Nothing. As Winnie The Pooh has said, “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.”
*David Elkind coined the phrase The Hurried Child in his book of the same name.
Additional Reading:
The Price of Hurrying Children