It’s the summer holidays and for thousands of parents up and down the land, this means hearing “WHAT ARE WE DOING TODAY?” screamed in their ears at breakfast.
I have two daughters and they’re 10 and five years old.
Modern kids expect the world. Day trips. Entertainment. Activities.
Let’s rewind to the 80s. A different time and my own experience of “the summer holidays”. I often stayed with my Granny in Coventry. She was a busy woman – volunteering, cooking, and battling the patriarchy. If I’d asked her the question – “What are we doing today Gran?” she would have replied – “No idea.”
The notion that you “entertained” your kids/grandkids didn’t exist. Adults did adult things, sometimes they pushed a swing, but mainly they went to work, complained about the mess, tidied up and cooked (which is a lot already right?)
In the garden shed lived a pair of mouldy stilts that had been passed down through two generations of our Irish family.
One year, I spent an entire summer walking up and down the path on these stilts. When I got to the end of the garden, I’d turn around and walk back. No “bubble tea” as a reward. No iPad. No trips to the zoo.
And look I’m perfectly okay!
In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that being bored is good for kids, helping to foster creativity and self-reliance.
So last week I let my 10 and 5 year old daughters sample a “1985 school summer holiday” to see how they’d cope. To be clear this was only for five days. I would help with brainstorming the initial activity but would try to intervene as little as possible (we didn’t have any stilts as I think they’ve now been outlawed due to health and safety concerns, much like pogo-sticks).
Day one
It’s Monday and the weather is sweltering. The familiar refrain echoes around the house and I channel Granny Edna.
“Why don’t you clear up the front garden?” I suggest, “And remember only boring people get bored.”
I toss a giant broom out the door and a dustpan and brush. Also a watering can (there are many photos of me watering plants as a child). Initially, I’m surprised that the kids leap at the chance to be of service (expecting extra pocket money probably), and the five-year-old flings herself into the sweeping with gusto. The older one gives it about three minutes of attention. The experiment lasts twenty in total until they spot a dead slug and come in squealing.
I was forced to go into Mum-tertainer mode for the rest of the afternoon and we ended up driving to a retail outlet to get some “treats” for them doing two minutes of very light gardening work.
Day two
I come downstairs. They ask me what we’re doing today. I tell them I have nothing planned and turn my laptop on. There is a lot of complaining, and I do some deep breathing outside.
When I walk back into the house I hear sweary, music blasting out of Alexa. When I get upstairs their bedroom looks like a burglary has happened. The 10-year-old is rubbing my bougie skin serum into her face, and my youngest is taking all the Sylvanian animal’s clothes off so they lie naked on the floor.
This “play” continues for another ten minutes but then a fight kicks off, and I have to take everyone to Tesco “to buy a watermelon”, (this is framed as an activity so is cheating I know).
Day three
My children cry when I tell them that “only boring people get bored”, for the hundredth time.
They tell me that we live in different times and when I was little I could go out on my bicycle and roam the streets without parents. They are right.
I often have conversations with fellow parents about how much freedom our generation had back then. Nowadays we’re fed so much frightening information, that we worry about sending our primary school kids out alone. We also fear we’ll be judged (and it happens – I’ve heard people make negative comments on parents who allow primary school kids out on their own).
I suggest the park but say that I have work to do so will be sitting on a bench, and not partaking in any role play. I answer some work emails, and they sit listlessly on the merry go round.
During hide and seek, the girls find a bit of used toilet paper behind a bush, and we have a long conversation about how important it is not to do a poo in public unless it’s a real emergency.
Day four
Today we make a blackberry crumble. Or I get the ingredients out and leave them to it. The thing is we have very little flour so the dough is runny. My youngest loses her temper and throws the contents of the bowl on the table. If I had done this in the 80s I would have got a clip round the ear. In the end I finish making the crumble while they watch TV. I then forget it’s in the oven and it burns.
Whilst I’m throwing the dish in the bin (too burnt to be saved) I look up and my daughter is reading. This feels like a miracle. I tiptoe away quietly and the reading continues for at least another 10 minutes!
Day five
In the 80s we didn’t have TV that was streamed into our eyeballs 24/7. We had things like The Dukes of Hazzard, which were on once a week. Or Knight Rider. Otherwise you switched it on and saw the “weird girl with the scary clown”, test card.
Today I opt for a “TV day”’, which means the older one watches skincare tutorials on YouTube. The younger one watches Annie (the new version) about five times.
It’s a good day.
The trick seems to be to watch content with them now and then so we can chat a bit about it. That way it feels more like a collective activity even if I am sometimes replying to work emails now and then. Also, I love Annie.
So what have I learnt from my low-intervention parenting week? Well firstly, it’s good to leave kids to entertain themselves when you can. There were moments when I observed that if the girls were left to their own devices, the two of them would “play” together without fighting (and that I was perhaps amplifying the troubles by trying to moderate between them).
I found out that my children are more self reliant than I thought. When they are truly left to “be bored” they tend to start entertaining themselves. When we all got through the discomfort and restlessness, a new calm emerged.
Secondly, it’s definitely true that modern kids miss out because they don’t have the freedom we had in the 80s (and is there a way to experiment with giving them more time outside on their own? What would this look like?)
And thirdly the adage – “only boring people get bored”, is actually really annoying.
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