The Joys of Unstructured Time
Nov. 30th, 2012 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blogcutterWhen I think of the things in life that I'm thankful for, the usual suspects certainly spring to mind - good health, family and friends, living in a democratic country with a high standard of living, and so on. But one of the factors that plays a significant role in my happiness quotient is the degree of control I have over my time and my day-to-day life now that I'm retired. Most of the time, I can get up when I want, go to bed when I want, have my meals when I want - I can pursue a lifestyle that's in tune with my circadian rhythms. That's not to say there's no room in my life for schedules or structured activities. But the point is that in most cases, I can pick and choose which activities I want to participate in and which ones I don't.
My post-war, baby-boomer, flower-child generation understood the value of unstructured time, whether we were dropping in or dropping out. But in the process of raising Generations X and Y, something seems to have happened to us. We decided that since we had the choice to become parents or not, we had to "do parenting" perfectly if we were going to do it at all. Having it all became doing it all. Some time in the 1980s, David Elkind wrote a book called The Hurried Child, all about how children were enrolled in endless classes and activities right from day one. They no longer played - they participated in playdates organized by their parents or other caregivers. To a great extent, we raised children who had to know every minute of the day whether it was art-time, outdoor-game time, story time, snack time or potty time. And as they grew up and technology advanced apace, young people felt lost if they didn't have some sort of techno-gadget in their hands.
Of course, hurried children are quite literally spawned by hurried parents. Hurriedness and busy-ness can be a choice to some extent, but it's also to a great extent an inevitable byproduct of the need to make a living. The trick is to make a living without losing our lives (with respect to quality more than quantity) in the process - and that's easier said than done.
How do we strike a balance between regular routine and unstructured time? Because it seems that for many people at many stages of their lives, there is an excess of one or the other. I may use future blogs to tackle the specifics of that statement as it applies to each stage - for example, I'm not sure I'm in favour of all-day kindergarten although I certainly understand why it's popular with harried and hurried modern families - but for now, suffice it to say that there are many kinds of learning and knowing and creating and sensing and feeling and developing as a human being. Some of them lend themselves well to traditional methods of instruction.
Others don't.
My post-war, baby-boomer, flower-child generation understood the value of unstructured time, whether we were dropping in or dropping out. But in the process of raising Generations X and Y, something seems to have happened to us. We decided that since we had the choice to become parents or not, we had to "do parenting" perfectly if we were going to do it at all. Having it all became doing it all. Some time in the 1980s, David Elkind wrote a book called The Hurried Child, all about how children were enrolled in endless classes and activities right from day one. They no longer played - they participated in playdates organized by their parents or other caregivers. To a great extent, we raised children who had to know every minute of the day whether it was art-time, outdoor-game time, story time, snack time or potty time. And as they grew up and technology advanced apace, young people felt lost if they didn't have some sort of techno-gadget in their hands.
Of course, hurried children are quite literally spawned by hurried parents. Hurriedness and busy-ness can be a choice to some extent, but it's also to a great extent an inevitable byproduct of the need to make a living. The trick is to make a living without losing our lives (with respect to quality more than quantity) in the process - and that's easier said than done.
How do we strike a balance between regular routine and unstructured time? Because it seems that for many people at many stages of their lives, there is an excess of one or the other. I may use future blogs to tackle the specifics of that statement as it applies to each stage - for example, I'm not sure I'm in favour of all-day kindergarten although I certainly understand why it's popular with harried and hurried modern families - but for now, suffice it to say that there are many kinds of learning and knowing and creating and sensing and feeling and developing as a human being. Some of them lend themselves well to traditional methods of instruction.
Others don't.
