Kids on the coast

Those were the days: There were few scheduled activities, not many toys and not much money, but 77-year-old Dolly’s eyes light up as she remembers all the fun she had as a child. She spent a lot of time in a local park where she’d meet up with a couple of dozen kids from the street. “We’d take our cricket sets and balls, hopscotch and just generally muck around,” she laughs. “Most of us were tomboys.”

Times have changed. Nambour’s Petrie Creek, once a pristine river with an abundance of fresh swimming holes, is now a struggling waterway. The paddocks and trees of the 1930s have been replaced by houses, shops and offices. The safe, uncomplicated world of Dolly’s childhood has vanished, and children are growing up in a vastly different world.
 
US psychologist and author David Elkind says children are now rushed through childhood and they are forced to grow up too fast. “Today’s child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress - the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations,” he says.
 
Dr Elkind believes contemporary parents live in a pressure-cooker of competing demands, transitions, role changes, personal and professional uncertainties. Well-meaning parents want to ‘get it right’ and they expose their children to a range of skills-based activities from early childhood, but children can feel overwhelmed by the pressure of excessive activities. He points out that chronic stress and emotional disorders are a result.
 
Sunshine Coast psychologist Dr Robi Sonderegger warns that when parent’s ambitions for their children are unrealistic and unattainable, these children may develop stress, anxiety, poor self-esteem and depression. He sees many young people at his Mountain Creek clinic who believe they are ‘not good enough’ as a result of high and unfulfilled parental expectations. “It’s important that expectations are achievable, that a child feels free to develop into the unique person they were created to be, and that they feel unconditionally loved, supported, and valued by their parents,” Dr Robi says. “While teaching our children to strive for excellence is a valuable lesson, we need to realise that it’s not always possible for children…to achieve excellence at all times in everything they do.”
 
Sunshine Coast mum Deanne Day agrees that kids are growing up in a much more competitive and time-poor environment. She has noticed that children seem more stressed these days, and she thinks that there is more pressure on children than ever before. Mother-of-three Deanne doesn’t believe her own children are growing up too fast, but she admits that her children have busy lives and very little free time.

Emma, 10, plays soccer and guitar, while eight-year-old Kain plays rugby league and Brooke, aged five, plays fun-net. Emma and Kain also attend an extended learning centre one afternoon a week. “Saturdays are busy for us, because there are three sports to fit in,” Deanne says. Deanne tries to limit her kids’ after-school activities, but she sees other local families with up to four extra-curricular activities scheduled for their children each week. These busy children often don’t get home until six or 7pm – an exhausting schedule for any young child.

Like Dolly, Deanne enjoyed a carefree childhood, with much more personal freedom than children these days. “There were about seven families – there used to be about 30 of us that would kick around together and we’d play bike ‘tiggy’ within four suburbs,” she remembers of her childhood in Brisbane. “Mum and Dad wouldn’t see us until the street lights came on.”

Unlike parents of old, Deanne and husband Warren are both professionals who juggle successful careers with parenting responsibilities. They don’t have a lot of spare time either and Deanne manages by sharing before and after-school care with another parent, and by relying on Warren to finish work early two days a week.

Dr Robi says parents need to find the right balance between structured activities and free play for children, and this balance is important in the hurried lifestyles that many families lead. He is concerned that unstructured, free play has become virtually non-existent for many modern-day families. Australian author and educator Angela Rossmanith agrees. In 50 Great Tips for Healthy Kids she explains that free play allows children the time to build inner resources that provide firm foundations for adult life.
 
However, it’s not easy for parents to create space and quiet time for their children to build these inner resources through imaginative play. Sunshine Coast teacher and father-of-four Steve Plummer believes that some parents may not have found that balance. “Everyone just seems so overloaded and busy these days,” he says.

Steve and his wife Jenny understand the importance of free play time so their kids can unwind and have fun together as a family. “You need downtime,” Steve says. “You need your family time, and I think the kids need their own time to experience new things and to gain confidence and to grow. But there must be a balance of those things.”

Steve and Jenny make sure their kids have time for unstructured play each day but he admits that he and Jenny still struggle to get the balance right and some days are better than others. “It depends which day of the week it is,” he laughs. Steve and Jenny both work fulltime, and their parenting responsibilities include coaching their children’s sports teams. “In some respects we’d probably like to be less busy,” Steve says. “But then our lives would maybe also not be as rich as they are.” An effective slow-down tool for Steve and Jenny is setting aside one car-free day a week. He says they strive for that, but they don’t always succeed.

Unlike Dolly’s youth, technology invades a modern childhood. It provides us with wonderful tools for communication, but at the same time technology is a double-edged sword that increases the frantic pace of our lives. It creates new problems for parents, as they try to manage their children’s engagement with multi-media and electronic devices. Steve and Jenny monitor the amount of time the kids spend in front of the television or computer. “There are times when we just say ‘the TV’s off, so go and do something else’,” Steve says.

Dr Elkind argues that contemporary media hurries children as they receive too much information, too fast. He warns that information overload can produce an emotional overload, and the result is chronic stress. Symptoms include feelings of restlessness, irritability and difficulty concentrating, and children may suffer from what Sigmund Freud called “free-floating anxiety” as it is not attached to a specific fear.

Dr Robi says media and communication technologies are problematic because they take the imagination out of play. Children may struggle to entertain themselves and they may even find the allocation of free play time stressful. “Many quite simply don’t know what to do with themselves, incessantly nagging mum with that beloved, whining question ‘what can I do?’” Dr Robi says.

Dr Robi advises parents to limit the time their children spend on ‘technology’ activities. “As a general rule of thumb, a healthy guide for parents is to operate on a 2:1 ratio,” he says. “For example, for every minute spent on the computer, play station, or watching TV, two minutes should be spent outside or engaging in other imaginative play activities.”
 
Although the quality of parent-child relationships is vital for a healthy upbringing, Dr Robi says parents who are overly focused on stimulating their child’s brain and body, with a variety of structured activities, often neglect the heart. “Real development often comes not from what we do, but who we do it with and how positively engaging the experience is,” he explains. “If we are able to convey a clear message to our child that ‘there is nothing that you can do…that would make me love you any more or less’, we foster long-lasting emotional security and genuine personal development.”
 
His advice to parents is to invest time in fostering the relationships with our children, by participating in fun and stimulating activities with them, rather than investing time in being a taxi driver for our children or a spectator at their events. “It is perhaps the greatest investment a parent can make,” he says, because children come to know they are loved for who they are, not for what they do or how well they do it. “By balancing structured, unstructured, and intentional family-relation activities, we set our children up for physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and even spiritual benefits.”

We can often learn a lot from the past and grandmother Dolly urges parents to replace television and computer time with family activities. Almost 70 years on, she still has fond memories of childhood trips with her father and brothers to Twin Water's North Shore, where they would light a fire and toast sandwiches while they fished off the beach. Her advice to young parents is to slow down and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

Further reading
 
The Hurried Child by David Elkind. US psychologist David Elkind discusses the pressure placed on children as they are forced to cope with the social and technological changes that strip away their childhood. Dr Elkind offers insight and advice to parents on how to protect children from the overwhelming stress and emotional overload that may result.