Wednesday 8 February 2012

Living our dreams through our children

Recently I did some research on the Internet to find ways of encouraging a child's creative side, boosting their imagination and skills at the same time. I also looked for ways to help a child enjoy sports and being outdoors. My motives were to ensure Lydia's future could be whatever she wanted it to be, and that she wouldn't be stuck inside playing video games and watching TV while the world outside passed her by.

During my research I found countless articles about pushy parents, those who practically force their own children to do a ridiculous amount of activities outside of school, often to the extreme of depriving them of being a child. Examples of this include parents forcing their children to have insanely busy after school schedules, with ballet lessons, soccer practise, piano practise and various other musical or sporting lessons.

I read an article on the Psychology Today website (which you can read here) on this very subject. One parent in question wondered why her 9 year old son was complaining that he was tired all the time, despite the fact that she had set up a series of extracurricular activities for him that included "three team sports, church activities, scouts and ... piano lessons twice a week". When the psychologist mentioned that this might be the cause of his tiredness, she said she was simply giving her son all the opportunities that she never had when she was a child. This is probably very reasonable thinking, as we all want our children to enjoy their lives and have every opportunity available to them. However, this kind of thing has to be done in moderation.