I love Mint Lounge. In my opinion, it is the best Indian weekend news magazine. It speaks to Indian millennials in the most personal way. I have never met Shalini Ramachandran, Shrabonti Bagchi, Avantika Bhuyan, Uday Bhatia, Aditya Mani Jha, Raja Sen, Shrenik Avlani, Pulasta Dhar, Somak Ghoshal, Sonali Gupta, Abhilasha Ojha, and several others; however, my Saturdays will be incomplete without them!
The column name I love the most is “Raising Parents”. So thoughtful and so Mint Lounge! The latest “Raising Parents” column titled “I am bored – need not make parents recoil in horror” was wonderful. It took me on rabbit holes to my childhood, the books I read, and the essays that left a lasting impact. It stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reflect on my parenting.
Our daughter is just 2 years old. Even then, I keep impulsively asking every tutor I meet at her pre-school or our apartment about when she can start taking these additional classes (be it drawing, dance, swimming, or badminton). An influencer said this is the age when neurons form. They said the more you expose kids to new experiences the better. I can’t ignore that suggestion. Hence this article was as relevant to me as to every teenage parent.
Article Summary
The article talks about:
- how a child’s life goes from being vibrant and colorful (unstructured playtime) to monochrome (routines crammed with classes, extracurriculars, and enrichment sessions) in a matter of a few years (when they reach adolescence)
- How overparenting aka micromanagement of schedules by parents is affecting our teenagers
- We hear more parents being upset with their teenagers’ lack of interest in hobbies and extracurriculars
- Many teenagers today are not confident in their own decisions of what to do with their time, and often end up looking for external validation for everything they want to do
- Why it is so hard for parents to not micromanage
- The default wiring of our brains leads us to crave control
- By fixing the schedules for our children, we get a huge sense of control and accomplishment
- Why we should give our children the breathing space
In this sequel of sorts, I would like to highlight 3 relevant insights from a book chapter, a hard-hitting essay, and my personal experiences (both from my childhood and as a parent observing kids in our apartment)
The Book Chapter
(Chapter 12: The confinement of our children both Physically and Psychologically from the book “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention” by Johann Hari)
This was one of the first books I read to improve my attention. It continues to amaze me every time I reread it. It digs deeper into the attention crisis (aka the daylight robbery of our attention (both kids and adults))
In chapter 12, Johann highlights 5 key components related to free play that are key to improve our kids’ preparedness for life in general and for developing their attention skills in specific. He suggests that the deterioration in each of these components has led to the attention crisis today. Below is a summary of each of these:
- There is a direct correlation between exercise and attention. Moving or just exercising improves focus.
- If you say no to their natural desire to run around, their attention and overall health of their brains suffer.
- I remember listening to a podcast of a top Montessori teacher in Bangalore. She said that any classroom that stops kids from moving and traps them in the 4 walls of a classroom is doing them a disservice. This was one of the key tenets of the Montessori method; you never restrict the children
- Children learn the most important skills when they play. They need these skills for their whole lives.
- Supervised play, like processed food, drains all the value from free play.
- When children play alone, they learn to understand their peers. They learn to like and dislike each other. They share their ideas while making the game’s rules. They learn to win, lose, and handle the challenges that come up.
- Research has shown that play significantly impacts three areas of child development – creativity and imagination, social bonds, and aliveness (learning to experience joy and pleasure).
- The primary technology for learning is play. You learn to learn in play.
- Without free play, children are more vulnerable to anxiety; While play gives them opportunities to cope with the unexpected, a lack of the same dents their confidence to cope with unforeseen events, which ultimately leads to a fear of the future
- Free play and free time are the only probable ways for children to discover themselves and their intrinsic motivations. Without time for these, youngsters do not have the opportunity to understand what they like, love, dislike and hate and grow up without a good understanding of their own selves, values, and aspirations
- When their entire schedule is meticulously planned to the tee (the classic examples of extrinsic motivation), they pass through their days like automatons and have a tough time discovering their core interests and strengths
- They don’t find meaning in anything until they have enough time for themselves which can be too late
- It is so easy to focus on things we have our hearts set on (in other words, intrinsically motivated)
- Play allows youngsters to have a sense of mastery (the feeling that they are good at something); This feeling of competence is essential to sustain their attention in something they love for a long time (even if it is boring in the short term)
- Youngsters feel they are incompetent at something, it becomes much harder for them to focus or engage with the activity they are force
This was such a revealing chapter and it really helped me understand how my childhood and play could have shaped the person I am today. And more importantly, it substantiates Avantika’s ideas with more data and facts. Johann also shares the story of Lenore Skenazy, the co-founder of the Let Grow, an organization that is making it easy, normal and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy adults.
The Essay
Why aren’t smart people happier? , by Adam Mastroianni
Early this year, I read this interesting essay by a Post Doctoral researcher who studies people, period. In the age of Gen AI, it gave me hope. It took an interesting view of defining intelligence. It defines intelligence as the skill of solving well defined and poorly defined problems. Scoring high in the IQ test, winning a chess championship are well defined problems, while questions like “how do I live a life I like” and “how do i find my Ikigai” are poorly defined problems. Any amount of data and compute you throw at it will not be able to solve for it. The key idea of this article is that winning chess matches and becoming the most well read expert on a subject may suggest that you are smart. But, your life will be a big mistake if you don’t learn to solve the poorly defined problems of life. These are things like: what do you do when you learn that your benefactor is a pedophile? And, how do you handle your animalistic urges when you have the power and position to abuse them for your pleasures?)
So, my hypothesis is that to be better humans, we need to find the poorly defined problems to solve for in the right order. We need to ask the right questions at the right time. Then, we need to find creative and effective ways to solve these problems. And to do all of this, we must embrace leisure and unstructured play. Because how does one figure out by keeping themselves busy all day? How does one know what they like and don’t like if they don’t spend time for self-reflection? How can you learn about the things that give you joy under the supervision of a coach or coercion?
For 33 years, I have crammed every free time I have had with some form of self-improvement activity. It could be a book, a newsletter, a new psychology theory, a philosophy, or an idea from the latest self-help trendsetter. But, chasing the next big self-help idea has left me tired. It has not just been ineffective, but counterproductive.
Over the last year, thanks to a life-changing diagnosis, I was forced to go deeper into myself. No one said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard. I had developed so much repulsion to myself, I had to be constantly engaged with my phone or an idea, or something other than my self. I had to be distracted to escape. Every waking moment I had to be constantly stimulated. It was when I had to hold my newborn daughter for long periods that I realized how much I had grown averse to myself. Holding her and looking at the sky was tough. Being forced to bring myself to her was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. It was a mirror to my restlessness and inner turmoil. Armed with this insight, I started inviting silence and free time into my life. I have now started embracing discomfort gradually. I am continuing to learn to bear the discomfort I was most afraid of. It’s being with myself without any outside stimulation or distractions.
My ability to reflect and think more has been boosted by my mindfulness and journaling. As Bhante H Gunaratana says, “Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.” After all these years, I hustled and ran to figure out what to do with this one wild and precious life. Now, the answer is just starting to find me. With more time for play, I am figuring out the things I love and the people I love. I’m more in tune with the big ideas that my gut and muse surface to me now and then. This play and time have helped me find peace. From this peace, I can spread the joy that’s in me instead of seeking it from the world.
The bottom line therefore is to get better at solving the poorly defined problems in life. To get better at solving these problems, both kids and adults need more free time and play. They need this to go deeper into themselves. The only way to find oneself is to lose oneself in things we find motivating. Too much hovering and a military-like schedule of classes and activities won’t help our kids. It won’t help them get better at solving life’s hard problems. Sadly, it will make them poor at finding the right questions/problems and also affect their ability to solve them. This includes life’s most ambiguous problem: finding happiness!
Personal Experience
Childhood:
As a child, I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. I still remember being afraid to play because of my parents’ reprimands and beatings. Their fears were valid. Boys my age had developed bad habits and fallen in with the wrong crowds. But, I felt cocooned inside my home due to the lack of free time, free play, and healthy friends. I studied all day, played video games, or watched TV.
Looking back at the book chapter, the essay, and Avantika’s article made me introspect. It made me think about how they could have shaped the adult I am today.
- I still struggle to make decisions. They range from the simple (eg: deciding if I should take a color or b&w printout of an important document). Or, should i share something publicly on Twitter or Social Media?) to the hard / complex (eg: should i pursue my real interests in life? can i be truthful to my parents and friends about my real feelings?)
- I don’t even know if my problems were well or poorly defined. I don’t know how to solve them. I’m always overwhelmed thinking about the order to solve them. It’s still a struggle, but I’m getting better.
- I struggle to pay attention to the most important things in life (in spite of knowing what they are). I keep skirting around from task to task without spending enough time on the stuff that i love the most. It’s almost like my mind is like foraging birds. They keep moving from branch to branch forever. They search for the next tree that can cater to all their hunger for today. I have never spent my time on any project for more than 1/2 weeks at the maximum right until last year.
- I berate, shame, and guilt myself into a vicious thinking loop that keeps going on.
- Continues to reinforce the internal message that I am not good enough to create anything worthwhile.
- exacerbates the feelings that only a cocktail of negative emotions can produce, and
- distracts me every day from the path I have planned for myself.
It wouldn’t be an overstatement to link all of these challenges to the lack of free play and free time right until my teenage years. The problem with growing up like this is that, once you grow up and become an adult, it’s hard to diagnose this loop. It’s even harder to escape it. It took me 33 years, a life-changing diagnosis and lots of reading about childhood, attention, and writing helped me to realize this.
P.S – I don’t have any hard feelings about my parents. They were trying their best to raise 2 kids, while sustaining the roof over our heads. The bad influences they had to prevent us from were more important than the good environment they could nurture for us. And more importantly, whatever we do, all parents (then, now and in the future) are going to create problems for our kids. You give them all your attention, they end up being unable to decide who they are, you don’t give them attention, they don’t understand what their boundaries are, and get into trouble all their lives. As Donald Winnicott says, we should all aim to be good enough parents, and we all need to continuously find the balance. Becky Kennedy’s words of wisdom always help me in this aspect – the only 2 objectives of parenting are to:
- Set up boundaries for their offspring to help them understand what’s good vs bad in life and the world we live in.
- Help their children understand their core values and aspirations as soon as possible in their lives
Adult:
I have always been fascinated by Maria Montessori who made it her life’s mission to observe kids and understand early human development. The world we live in today is shaped in many ways by the Montessori Mafia which includes Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. (Highly recommend this WSJ article about them). After the birth of our daughter in 2022, I have become more curious about child development and have simultaneously had the opportunity to observe kids in our apartment complex.
On the one hand:
- I am more than happy to see some youngsters having the time to play around and do things that they love without being supervised by their parents. No summer camps, no activities, just leisure in April and May.
- I am amazed by the maturity of some of the teenagers in my apartment; they speak of aspirations for an Ivy League education, read 500+ page sci-fi books, and have very interesting ways of playing and engaging with our daughter
- I am amazed by teenagers and even younger kids approaching me out of the blue to share a joke or to get my opinion on something that has been on their mind or to just say a quick Hi (i still struggle reaching out to strangers even in my office)
On the other hand:
- I also see kids who are quite reserved and have a tough time engaging in a simple conversation not only with adults but also with their peers.
- I see kids with lots of energy (and mischief) being labeled as troubled. They find it very hard to engage with their peers and parents.
- I find kids spend too much time on screens. They struggle with boredom. They are restless and unfocused. They care more about answers than questions.
Internet, smartphones, and Gen AI have propelled us into a whole new era of abundance to which our scarcity brains are still adjusting. When even adults find it difficult to navigate these changes and challenges, our children are going to have a tough road ahead. Nevertheless, when the going gets tough, the tough get going!
If we do not help our children and teenagers find themselves and set the right boundaries, we are at risk of repeating our ancestors’ mistakes. Both of these things need free time and free play.
