The Editor's View

The Value of Downtime

Volume 3 / Issue 2 / Winter 2003

I frequently speak at workshops on the topic of raising a healthy gifted child. An increasing number of attendees voice frustration that their children’s lives are overscheduled. Today’s parents feel tremendous and growing pressure to involve their children, at ever younger ages, in after-school and weekend educational and recreational activities. Consequently, the parents are exhausted, and their children have little free time.

My advice is to follow the sensible parenting principle of encouraging balance in their children’s lives. To be sure, it is important for children, especially those with special needs, such as the gifted, to have exciting, stimulating, challenging, and enjoyable out-of-school growth opportunities: music, dance, acting and art lessons, weekend and distance-learning courses, tutoring, volunteer work, religious youth programs, community recreational and sports programs, and the like.

However, children also need what Anna Quindlen aptly calls “the gift of boredom,” including unstructured, unencumbered time to play, be creative, relax, and daydream. Over the past 20 years children’s free time has declined an average of 12 hours per week. Children today have 50 percent fewer unstructured outdoor activities and 25 percent less playtime than their parents did. At the same time, many of today’s families do not have regular family dinners, and 21 percent of teenagers rate “not having enough time together with parents” as their top concern.

The overscheduled child misses out on important downtime and family time. I encourage you to evaluate whether your gifted child has enough free time to unwind and to connect in meaningful ways with the rest of the family.
—Steven I. Pfeiffer, Ph.D.