The Over-Scheduled Child: Raising Kids After Divorce
The Over-Scheduled Child: Raising Kids After Divorce
Part 5: Over-scheduling and Creativity
Is your child “missing” activities because you can’t afford them, or don’t have time to take him, or the schedule interferes with his father’s visitation? Stop worrying. You may be doing your child a big favor. Less can actually be more.
Here is the fifth article for FWW by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of “The Over-Scheduled Child.”
What about creativity and innovation, which pundits say are crucial for America’s economic success? Einstein maintained that “imagination is more useful than knowledge.” Yet hyper-parents criticize kids when they just want to lollygag and fault themselves for not finding more for them to do.
Parenting is a higher calling than being a cruise ship activities director!
Perhaps more important — and this comes as a surprise to many parents — boredom can actually be beneficial; it can stimulate kids to hear the soft murmurings of their inner voice, the one that makes them write an unusual story or draw that unique picture.
That creativity is critical. America’s economic success is based on people who bucked conventional wisdom, followed their inner passions, tinkered, and created, people like Alexander Graham Bell, David Packard, Matt Groening and college dropouts Michael Dell and Bill Gates.
We’re lucky that Alexander Graham Bell was not as over-scheduled as our kids. If he had been, we might still be using carrier pigeons to communicate!
Good schools often fail to recognize truly creative kids. One young man desperately wanted to make films. He applied to UCLA’s prestigious film program: Rejected!
So he went to Long Beach State.
Later he applied to USC’s film program. Rejected again!
But he was tenacious. His name: Steven Spielberg.
And some kids don’t peak in high school. Not very long ago, another young man did so poorly in his New Jersey high school that he was told that at best, he was a junior college kind of kid. His family had little money, so he went to a local junior college and — to support himself — became a part-time firefighter.
In junior college, a history course turned him on; he began to work at school, to learn, and to succeed. He is Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor.
Another factor may be even more critical in child rearing: All too often, accolades — winning the soccer trophy or spelling bee — are treated as the true measure of the child.
Related Content:
Click the following for Raising Kids After Divorce Part 6: Over-Scheduling and Values
“The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper Parenting Trap,” by Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, can be purchased in paperback through Amazon.
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