The Magic Trees of the Mind by Marian Diamond

Author:Marian Diamond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Children and Free Time: What’s the Use?

By the old-fashioned definitions of IQ, centered largely around verbal and math ability, the average child might get all the brain stimulation and enrichment he or she needs just by going to school each day. By the more realistic model encompassing many different kinds of intelligence, a very conscientious school might try to hit all the areas during a given week with a carefully designed program. However, many—perhaps most—children don’t attend such enlightened schools. And even if they did, a school day—as interminable as it may seem to a child on a beautiful spring afternoon—takes up just a fraction of his or her waking time. Grade-schoolers sleep close to ten hours per night, and of their fourteen remaining hours, only four-and-one-third or 29 percent are spent in school classes. Children under age eleven spend about three additional hours eating, doing homework, talking to parents, visiting relatives, doing chores, engaging in personal activities, and going to religious services or events. The remaining six hours per day, then, are the child’s free time. Since most children aren’t in school at all during weekends and summer months, school represents less than 15 percent of a child’s waking hours in a calendar year. To a parent interested in enriching a child’s environment and experiences, it is important to choose the best school possible based on family resources and location. By using this school time quotient, parents could legitimately devote half again as much concern to the enrichment value of their children’s free time as they do to their school time. But do they?

Sociological studies show that for children under age nine or so, parents—by design or default—determine how a child spends most of his or her free time. A working parent might enroll a child in after-school day care with its structured activities. Parents might sign the child up for lessons, classes, or sports teams. They might instruct him or her to go straight home after school and stay there until mom (usually) gets off work. Or they might combine two or all three of these. These frameworks—day care, organized activities, home—account for most after-school time. Evening activities tend to be centered around home and family, with by far the most common events shared by American families being meals and watching television.

Within the framework of parent-directed free time, then, what exactly are grade school children doing? A group at the University of Illinois and Loyola University studied children in almost 1,000 households to answer that question, and what they found may surprise you. On weekdays, grade school children spend the listed average number of minutes on the following activities:2 minutes on hobbies

4 on art activities

8 out-of-doors

8 reading

11 in miscellaneous passive leisure-time activities

18 engaged in sports (25 for boys, 12 for girls)

124 watching television

128 in general play

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.