Did the Pandemic Normalize Overscheduling the Little Ones?

In the last two years of the pandemic days, “I’m bored” cries from kids made parents feel like almost a failure in the parenting game. One major dilemma that parents faced was what to do about the extra time children got in hand when schools turned online.

Some parents wanted to make sure that those extra hours were spent productively while others just wanted their children to be engaged in something useful so that the kids won’t create any disruption at home. Then some parents simply gave in to the FOMO that if they don’t schedule curricular and extracurricular activities besides the regular classes, their kids might miss out on golden opportunities to build enough skillsets necessary for them to succeed in the rat race that they will eventually fall into. Thus, parents for various reasons began signing up their children for different online classes provided by various EdTech platforms.

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Such classes were useful for many kids who improved their proficiency in a certain area or develop an interest in a new field that was unfamiliar to them before. However, this also came with a downside, at times parents ended up overscheduling their kid’s time with no space for empty hours. As a result, children became over-dependent on their parents to find sources of entertainment to rescue them from the depths of boredom.

Recently a teacher I am familiar with recounted a story of how a 9-year-old child logged in for a one-on-one online class with a helmet on that made him resemble a miniature iron man. The child had around 9-10 hours of screentime that day which was a culmination of his regular classes, tuition classes, extracurricular classes and gaming time. The extended periods of screen time had left his eyes watery and swollen. His idea to protect his eyes from further damage was to wear a helmet.

He is one of the thousands of kids whose free hours are mostly controlled by tuition centres or EdTech companies. The crisis of overscheduled children existed even before the pandemic. However, the pandemic made overscheduling appear like a panacea for many ill effects of the pandemic on children and therefore seemed justifiable. Now, that schools are opening and life is slowly becoming normal, are we going to unlearn this habit of overscheduling kids' time and give them opportunities to experience empty hours in a day?

Just like how adults need some downtime after a long day of work to recharge their batteries, even children need some unscheduled empty hours in a day. Empty hours allow them to reflect on the day’s happenings, put a perspective on those happenings, process life lessons that they happen to learn, simply daydream or fantasize something. If your 12-year-old doesn’t have any free time, when will he fantasize about travelling to the depths of the Pacific to study coral reefs? Who knows if that fantasy is going to inspire him to become a marine scientist, a scuba diver or even a geologist? If your 10-year-old doesn’t have time to process the sadness or jealousy she felt when her friend scored more marks than her in an exam, won’t she be missing out on putting into perspective a fundamental lesson in life about dealing with success and failure?

It is quite normal for children to feel overwhelmed by free time and complain about it. However, such complaints should not always push you into panic mode and make you frantically search for ways to schedule activities for your child. Children need to learn to manage one’s time, make decisions about how to use it wisely, and find creative ways to utilize their time. Having pockets of empty hours in a day help in achieving that.

While we all want the young generation to turn into well-rounded individuals, the path for that is not always overscheduling. Let’s leave pockets of empty hours for the little ones and let those empty hours turn into fertile grounds for creativity and self-directed learning.