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>It's not unusual in my circles that kids are both playing football, taking piano lessons, learning french on top of their school and homework.

We are filling our kid's time with all these structured activities to "enrich" their lives. To give them a leg up in the adult world. To make them smarter and well rounded. We fill our houses with a whole bunch of "enriching" toys.

This is extremely misguided.

The majority of a child's free time should be self directed. They need to experience boredom for proper development. Only in boredom do kids learn to be creative and process their thoughts in a meaningful way. They learn to live with the anxiety boredom creates and channel it into new ideas.

Micromanaging their lives leads to very poorly adjusted and anxious adults. I am very sad when I see car trip filled with iPads and TVs. Kids need to learn how to deal with the boredom of car rides and sit quietly with their thoughts.

Structured activities are great in moderation.

*Adults actually require boredom as well but it is especially valuable for the rapidly developing brains that kids have.

There is no boredom in the modern world. The Internet is an endless cesspool of poor quality entertainment, expertly arranged to give us the impression that we learn something or interact meaningfully with other people.

Believing that a child will improve themselves and realize their potential without guidance and an appropriate amount of forcing is, in my opinion, misguided.

Science disagrees with you.

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-21895704

http://greatist.com/happiness/benefits-of-boredom

Nobody said you shouldn't guide your child sometimes but sometimes your child needs to guide themselves too. We are taking away the latter in the modern world.

I got bored during school pretty much every class, and I filled that time with doodling on paper, then writing stories and poetry, then trying to come up with my own language, then teaching myself programming by making games on my calculator.

I should also note that I wasn't supposed to be doing any of that stuff, and I would have gotten in trouble with the teacher if they caught me doing it and "not paying attention".

Based on my anecdotal experience, I do believe that there's something to the 'boredom leads to children developing their creativity' assertion, as stated in that bbc article.

I don't think it's misguided at all in fact it gets to the very essence of what it could mean to be successful in a modern world. The ability to develop you on your own premises rather than the rest of the modern worlds.

Exactly!

Boredom is very very important early on.

It's something you have to internalize and become familiar with and not fear. Way too many adults try and make sure their kids aren't bored IMO and thus the kids start fearing it because they never learned what a powerful engine for reflection and thinking it actually become.

Thats something you have to train.

Kids can get cranky and annoying when they are bored. It's so easy for an adult to give them an iPad when they are on the train to shut them up (so to speak). The less they learned to deal with these feelings themselves the more they begin to "need" the iPad for idle time and the more cranky and annoying they can get without it. Its a positive feedback loop.

And the parent learned that when it's bored, he pulls out a smoke, grabs a beer/food/chocolate, not being aware what he's doing when giving the iPad. It might seem more healthy compared to those, but it's really the same convenient habit.

I'm 51, and my parents signed me up for a whole smorgasbord of structured activities: Music, figure skating, swimming, etc. Gradually, most of those activities fell by the wayside, but I stuck with music, and my involvement increased in intensity -- private lessons on two instruments, a third instrument in the school band, playing in the local community orchestra, etc.

We are filling our kid's time with all these structured activities to "enrich" their lives. To give them a leg up in the adult world. To make them smarter and well rounded. We fill our houses with a whole bunch of "enriching" toys.

Yup, that was my life.

Yet, I had plenty of free time. What gives? The missing variable is schoolwork. The schools that I attended assigned very little homework, and it was generally easy to finish, during class time, plus a few hours maximum, per week at home. Indeed, even with my structured activities, I still watched TV, played outside, and pursued my own interests. Today, our leaders tell us that kids should learn how to code. I taught myself programming and electronics when I wasn't doing homework.

Today, the kids have hours of inane homework every evening, and much of it is configured to practically require using the computer, with all of its distractions and productivity pitfalls. We still want them to have enriching activities -- my kids are as involved in music as I was. Yes, free time gets squeezed out, but I don't think parents are entirely to blame. A normal childhood should have plenty of time for both structured and unstructured activity.

There are, as they say, many ways to Rome. I discovered most interests myself, my parents had absolutely nothing to do with them.

There is no right or wrong here.

The point I was trying to make was just that my generation seem to be more impatient in general which is a shame as we do need people who understand things in depth.

If I leave my kids for themselves they will spend all time watching Netflix and playing Minecraft. It's just better than watching TV.

I teach basic maths to adults mainly but also a couple of classes of teenagers in a further education college in the UK - the US equivalent is called a community college I believe.

This year, I won the timetabling lottery and got classes with fine art, graphics, fashion and media students.

Usual distractions (phones: Facebook, various instant messaging services &c). I gave each student a simple cardboard document wallet to keep finished work in and suggested that they put their name on the wallet and 'customise' it.

Silence: focussed activity for 15mins. I carry a box with a couple of sets of Sharpies of various colours plus Muji pens and pencils. Grabbed and distributed in a coordinated Mexican wave. Seriously, the full Csikszentmihalyi flow.

Now I have to find a way of channelling that into Maths... I'm taking Tufte's books in next week to see what happens.

TD;LR Digital natives can concentrate when they want to.

Solitary downvoter: care to engage with my argument?

It wasn't me who down-voted you, but perhaps it was someone else who wasn't familiar with a single one of the capitalized words/phrases in the paragraph:

"I carry a box with a couple of sets of Sharpies of various colours plus Muji pens and pencils. Grabbed and distributed in a coordinated Mexican wave. Seriously, the full Csikszentmihalyi flow."

OK, thanks for feedback and apologies for specific references, here goes with the definitions...

Sharpies: 2mm thick permanent marker pens in bright colours

Muji: Japanese stationery shop with a good stock of fine nib gel and ink pens

Mihali Csikszentmihalyi is a philosopher who has articulated the concept of flow-state. The relevant Wikipedia page is a good basic guide [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

"Mexican wave"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_%28audience%29

I was using the term as a metaphor for the way that particular group of students just all went for the chance to draw something.

Thankyou for engaging.

I'm going to translate from teacher-ese for you:

"While my students normally exhibited a substantial amount of distraction in our class, I was pleased to discover that since they were all artistically-oriented students, an impromptu art activity was able to occupy their full undivided attention for an extended period of time."

You're welcome.

Sure they can. It's a human ability. What I am talking about is a cultural thing not genetic.

> It's not unusual in my circles that kids are both playing football, taking piano lessons, learning french on top of their school and homework. I believe this is fundamentally the wrong approach as it only teaches kids to skate over a subject rather than master one in full.

True, although on the other hand that's the best time to experiment what you'll potentially like and perhaps even base your interests and/or career on.

Yes but this is something I believe kids are perfectly fine figuring out themselves rather than parents sending them to all the things they wished they had learned when they were kids :)

...and then becoming insecure about our talents when we become moderately successful.

Not really. How can they figure out they love ice skating if they never tried it?

It is up to the parent to give direction to their child, not pressure them into something that they don't want but show them what is possible and out there.

Giving a child the freedom to do what it wants is probably not going to end up well in majority of cases.

Kids don't live in a vacum.

I have never told my son he should learn skateboarding, be a scientist or play music.

I didn't come out of a musical family and ended up playing music professionally for a couple of years.

No one is talk about giving them freedom to do what they want.

> Kids don't live in a vacum.

Sure. They don't, but when they are just starting school they still don't know much about what is possible, and out there.

> No one is talk about giving them freedom to do what they want.

Little bit of guidance won't hurt. There is nothing intrinsic in child's wishes. No one is blocking their inner genius by guiding them to pay attention to learning maths instead of painting, or dancing, or vice versa.

What do you mean they don't know what is possible? They are exposed to all sorts of of things way before they start school. Through friends, parents friends, family, media etc.

Nobody is saying guidance is bad. The point is when the guidance become constant. It's not about some innner genius, it's not even about finding what you are are good at. It's about finding the engine that will allow you to become good at something which is a combination between many factors including parents guidance.

But it's completely lacking when parent's start pushing the kids to try out may different things almost as chores.

Example: I knew literally nothing about any of the engineering disciplines until junior/senior year of highschool when a careers quiz directed me towards them.

Sure how many kids that are exposed to those do you think are going to start working towards being engineers when they are 5?

There is a big difference between finding an interest and then finding a career.

Ah, I see "before you start school" now..

Its market forces that created this condition.

I remember reading about this expert - he spent 20 years becoming an expert on blade design for aircraft engines.

We need more people like that but its hard to think what incentives we provide to people to chug through grad school. Its only in countries like germany where such incentives exists - in the anglosphere - its up to the parents.

There are obvious problems with that model - the thing is you need both - a lot of generalists and an equally large number of specialists for society to function.

But given how centrally we try to control everything its always one or the other rather a mixed bag.

Another view on this is that being exposed to different concepts and ways of thinking increases perspective and creativity. All of the things you mentioned as examples (football, playing piano and learning a language) all use very different modes of thought and activate different parts of the brain. It seems like the majority of people would really benefit from that diversity of experience.

I hear what you are saying but I actually think this is the wrong way to think about it.

The point I was trying to make is that if you just learn a little bit of music, a little bit of football, a little bit of french you are still only learning the same and getting the same perspective no matter how many different things you learn.

The trick IMO is to dig deep into something as this will teach you how to dig deep into other things later. I.e. you are actually gaining perspective on other areas even before you learn about them.

There is a big push at the moment for "T shaped people", ie with a broad range of experience with one or two specialities.

By exposing a wide range of activities to kids, they gain breadth. They can then choose what to explore in depth - that is their call.

"Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."

I am not talking about specializing I am talking about mastering. Thats a very different thing.

You can specialize in playing a sweeping technique on your guitar that does not make you a good musician.

And again. No I simply don't believe you gain breadth by being exposed to many different things. It's the other way around. Learning a lot of different things superficially is not going to teach you the real lessons.

It's not about acquiring a specific set of skills it's about acquiring an ability to learn how to learn.

> I believe this is fundamentally the wrong approach as it only teaches kids to skate over a subject rather than master one in full.

Reminds me of this Rich Hickey piece:

https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb

There is evidence from studies of youth sports that specialization at a young age can actually be detrimental to adult outcomes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3658407/

If you meet a professional athlete you'll understand firsthand what drawbacks there are to spending your first 2 decades super specialising.

Mastering does not mean on elite level.

You can master something without taking it into extremes. It's more going through the ups and downs of learning and experiencing progress and lack thereof.

I don't understand the general social disparagement of professional athletes. They have been through a filter the likes of which most of the rest of us have never experienced. Their skills and abilities are evaluated ruthlessly at every level -- if they come up short, they are out. The ones who make it are the best of the best at what they do. For each of them there are thousands of little league, high school and college athletes who did not. The people who make it through are the ones who are not only naturally gifted physically, but absolutely passionate about playing their sport. You have to be in order to put in the work needed to reach this elite level.

"The ones who make it are the best of the best at what they do."

I don't think the "social disparagement of professional athletes" is with regard to a lack of skill at "what they do", but the sacrifice of what they don't, coupled with a view that what they've sacrificed for isn't actually important.

My views on the matter are mixed.