Can I just be really honest for a second? And forgive me if I've said this before.
All the kids' activities on Pinterest kind of freak me the heck out. Not because they're bad activities (we all know the horror of the THIRD RAINY DAY IN A ROW), and I love all the creativity that goes into them, but ... Hmm. I'm not sure how to say it. *thinks*
It seems to me, that there is this cultural consciousness that expects kids to have every moment scripted out for them. What they're doing, who they're with, how they're playing, etc.
I love that there is more parental involvement, especially father involvement, and as the homeschooling movement has become rather mainstream now (certainly comparatively, and also from my perspective), I love that there are so many options for parents-as-teachers.
But I do *worry* that the constancy of pre-scripted crafts, play, activities, and constant supervision have a hidden cost: creativity and maturity.
A child needs free-play to develop their own methods of creativity. A child needs to be "bored" without adult intervention so they can learn how to entertain THEMSELVES. A child needs to experience age-appropriate conflict and come to a resolution themselves. I fear that in our search for safety and "the best" method to stimulate brain development, we're forgetting that a child needs room to take chances, get messy, and make mistakes.
I know I struggle with this a lot with my nephew. (Who I do NOT get to hang out with NEARLY enough!) I will have an activity all planned, and all the materials ready to go, and I'll be excited, and he'll come over, and do something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. He won't WANT to make cookies. He won't WANT to make puppets. He won't WANT to make pipe-cleaner candy canes, or if he does, he wants to do it "wrong!" It drives me a bit mad, especially because I'm a person who likes structure a LOT.
But when I'm able to stop being angsty about how my plans are "ruined," I'm able to see is his brain functioning at a much higher level than when he was just following MY ideas. He's starting to think for himself, make up stories, have ideas that I never even considered, seeing beauty and patterns where I saw a mess. (Not that he always gets to do what he WANTS when he's at my house.)
Now, sometimes, that means there is a REAL mess - spills and oops and things getting knocked over. I try to make sure that HE cleans it up, even though he does a four-year-old job of it, which drives my thirty-year-old self a bit insane. But it's all a learning experience, that teaches him: Yes, You Can.
I am a teacher, and in the 8 years I've been teaching (and the 20+ I've been observing teaching), I've seen a marked difference in the students in the past five years.
Many high school and middle school students have lost their ability to be creative, to problem solve, be self-disciplined and be self-reliant. At the beginning of the year, my open-ended art assignments confused and TERRIFIED my art students. Without specific instructions on WHAT to draw, they could not figure out what they were to do. During the comic book season, about half the class really struggled with self-management and projecting long-term to figure out how to finish a comic in 2 1/2 months, even WITH my handy-dandy weekly checklist. Also, they had no concept on how to cope with working as a team, dividing up work, or how to approach conflict with their team members.
Developmentally speaking, students this age SHOULD HAVE some kind of social strategy for dealing with conflict; they SHOULD HAVE an ability to plan, and execute a long-range goal; they SHOULD HAVE their own creative thoughts and ideas.
The fact that they don't worries me.
It's not just in art class where I've seen this inability to be self-directed, but across all the other classes too. A particularly concerning area is how the kids approach their homework. Many students will not (or can not) complete homework without an adult sitting in the room. When students are confronted with a problem they don't know the answer to right off, they quit, and wait until someone NOTICES they have a problem, and TELLS them how to do it. They won't even think of skipping the problem, and working on something else they just ... stop.
I'm very concerned about living in a generation of "adults" who do not have the ability to creatively come up with a solution for a problem.
I'm very concerned about living in a generation of "adults" who must constantly be told what to do.
I'm very concerned about living in a generation of "adults" who quit before they try.
Obviously, this not just caused by an abundance of pre-school and kindergarten activities on pinterest. It's also impacted by the unstable family life typical in America, our choices of entertainment, our school "system" (I apply the term loosely here), and many other social and cultural factors.
The activities on pinterest aren't BAD, and for harried and frazzled parents everywhere, they're a great resource! I do think, however, that they indicate a greater cultural problem where the freedom of creativity, and its consequences of messy mistakes is being stifled and traded in for the "safety" of prescribed roles and activities.
However, I don't think that we're going to find our trade-in to be worth the price.
