Parenting Help, Put Free Play Back in Kids' Day
Parenting Advice Says Downtime during the Day is Good for Children
May 17, 2009
Stay at home moms aren’t immune to feelings of guilt. Even though they gave up a career and many financial luxuries to provide a secure and stable environment for their kids, they often convince themselves they’re just not doing enough. Here's some parenting advice that might relieve some of that nagging inadequacy.
Parenting Help for Moms Giving Kids Constant Stimulation
New moms hold their babies for the first time and decide right there in the hospital bed to make a perfect world for them. Many stay at home moms have the idea they should be providing stimulation, new games, crafts, play dates, and one-on-one mommy time during the entire day. After all, that’s why they stayed home, isn’t it? A few minutes on the phone with a friend or checking email is sometimes enough to make them question their abilities as mothers.
It’s important to understand that these high expectations come from within. Furthermore, experts are uniting around the realization that constant stimulation and structure may actually be harmful to kids.
Parenting Advice on the Benefits of Imaginative Free Play
All the crafts, stories, activities, and baby gym classes stay at home moms fill their kids’ days with can be great opportunities. But, believe it or not, psychologists are discovering kids need those blocks of free play with absolutely no direction from mommies or teachers just as much.
Melinda Wenner’s January 2009 article, The Serious Need for Play, published in Scientific American asserts that “imaginative and rambunctious” free play is absolutely crucial to kids’ “social, emotional and cognitive development.” The article presents compelling studies suggesting that children who miss out on this type of play are less socially adjusted and less able to handle stress as adults.
The theory that the lack of free play impedes social development was put to the test in a 1997 study by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. The study followed children from two day care facilities. One facility allowed time for free play the other focused only on instruction and structured activities. As adults, the children whose days had been completely structured were overwhelmingly more likely to be suspended from work and even arrested. Apparently, the time kids spend imagining themselves in different roles and negotiating those pretend games with other children has long-lasting social benefits.
Lynn Barnett's 1984 study (Research Note: Young Children's Resolution of Distress Through Play) published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry measured the effects of free play on kids’ abilities to cope with stress. Kids’ levels of anxiety were assessed on their first day of daycare. The class was then split into two groups, one group played in a room of toys while the other group listened to a story read by the teacher. After 15 minutes, the kids were retested for stress. The number of kids who had shown signs of anxiety dropped twice as much in the group which was given time to play on their own. Researchers surmise kids create their own make-believe worlds to help them in stressful situations.
Several other studies indicate free play also has positive effects on IQ and language skills. So why are today’s kids finding less and less unstructured time for imaginative play?
According to Burdette and Whitaker's Resurrecting Free Play in Young Children (2005, Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine), kids’ time for free play was cut by a quarter between 1981 and 1997. Could this phenomenon be a direct result of overcompensating by moms who are plagued with feelings of guilt or inadequacy?
So, moms struggling to fill the day because they think that’s what stay-at-home moms are supposed to do can relax. They can take a minute to sip a cup of coffee while watching their children explore on their own.
And those moms who’ve already struck a balance of free and structured play just to save their sanity can keep it up and congratulate themselves for doing the very best thing for their children.
Moms may also be interested in reading about recent findings and parenting advice on an attached mother-child relationship or parenting help for emotional and financial budgetting adjustments that go along with becoming a stay at home mom.
