Part 8: Play (Beautiful reminders from Mitten Strings from God)
I have been wanting to re-share some posts from the days when I was a young mother - gems I had extracted from one of my wow-books*.
I am re-posting the series of 11 parts here, specially for the young mothers around me. May your journey of motherhood be as beautiful and as enjoyable as the Lord intended it to be for us!
[*Wow-books are those that have shaped my life in some ways, and they occupy a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf, treasured.]
So much of the structure that we impose on our children's lives is really intended to make our own lives easier.
We don't want to give up our freedom, and so we fail to grant our children theirs.
As every mother knows, it's easier to sign up for sports camp than to carve out a week to allow your children to follow their own inclinations at home.
But children need time that is utterly their own - time to take up residence in their own lives, time to dream through an afternoon, time to play with the kids next door, time to wake up to their own pleasures.
Above all, they need time when we adults can't calling the shots.
Ours is a work-driven culture, fueled by the anxieties of two-career families.
We overschedule our own days and keep our children yoked to the calendar as well.
There are lessons, organised sports, and playdates; videos, computers and electronic games to fill the hours in between.
All to often there is no such thing as "down" time, or even an opportunity for children to expereince the satisfaction of engaging in ordinary activites - brushing the dog, washing the car with a hose, walking to town for an ice-cream cone.
Perhaps we adults have lost the fine art of lollygagging.
We knew what it was to be bored and to find something on our own to do; we knew what loneliness felt like; and we discovered there was value in being alone sometimes.
I fear that our own busy, well-entertained children may not ever have the chance to learn them.
Inventiveness and self-reliance are being schduled right out of them.
It is difficult in our day and age for parents to simply set children free for the vacation.
But surely we can manage to give them a day or a week here and there, during which we adults fade into the background, erase the schedule and simply let them be.
If we plan all our children's days for them how will they learn to navigate through the idle shallows of their own lives, much less seek out and bask in those calm waters?
A child's sense of time and purpose bears no relation to our own.
To them, a day without a schedule is day of possibilities.
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