Children and teenagers have become busier more than ever. However, psychologists and neurologists say that pushing your children to practice and learn constantly, even during summer vacation, is not good for them.
Benefits of downtime
Helping children thrive and succeed in life is one of the issues that Lea Waters, a psychologist, has been researching for 20 years. Lea Waters published a book, The Strength Switch, and in the book, she suggests that parents should focus on building up their child's strengths instead of fixing their weaknesses.
Waters said that if you are only focusing on what is wrong with your child, what is missing and what needs to be fixed, the best results you can hope for is to take all of the things that you think are their weakness and change them to above average. However, if you start putting more of your time and attention as a parent on what is right and amplifying their strength, that is when they really reach their full potential.
Waters calls this approach the strength-based parenting. But she cautions that sometimes parents can go overboard by trying to get their child into extra tutoring and into extra classes. Parents can potentially risk over-structuring the lives of their children with the idea that practice equals building strength. In some sense that is true, but it is only partly true.
The result is usually an overcrowded schedule, keeping the child's brain constantly busy with gathering information, learning and practicing. Waters said that practice builds up strength, but so does downtime.
Brain's default mode
The brain has two alternative modes or networks, they are on-task focus and free-form attention. Immordino-Yang, a researcher, says that the on-task focus is about perceiving one's environment, watching and paying attention. An example of this is when you play sports.
Immordino-Yang said that you need to be watching other people on your team, and running fast and coordinating emotions and reacting to the things that you are perceiving. Then, there is another network that is very important for being able to make sense of what you are doing. This other network is deactivated when children are playing sports and if they are attending to the outside and the network it is activated when children are resting and just daydreaming, thinking about their memories and imagining things that do not exist here and now. Children need both modes of attention in order to function as a person.
Waters says that slowing down can help children reach their full potential. She said that it is a little bit like if you have too many programs running on your computer. A computer starts to slow down and when the programs are shut down, the computer speeds up again. It is very much like that for the child's brain.
Goofing off
Waters says that machines need to reboot, and children need to goof off. She said that by goofing off, it allows children to have some downtime. A child's downtime means that he or she is not focused on any specific task, and he or she can do something else like shooting baskets, or doing a creative project or playing. Whatever project that they are interested in should be done during their downtime, as long as they can get enjoyment from it.
Goofing off doesn't mean the brain becomes inactive
According to Waters, when children goof off, their brain goes into a default network mode and it uses that time to process all the information that it had during the day, in order to integrate the new information. Waters hope that parents understand that their children do not have to be busy constantly and instead they should be given permission to goof off every now and then.
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