Saturday, May 31, 2014

Making Room for Nothing by Lara Krupicka


After the mad dash at the end of the school year we could all use some rest and relaxation.  The relatively calm and stress-free start of the summer is a good time to reflect on ways to downsize your family's jam-packed activity calendar.

Raising the Bar summer programs fit perfectly into a streamlined summer schedule. Our camps don't start until the end of June to give you and your family some much needed downtime. Once July approaches, we have half-day options (as well as full-day) and each of our camps run for only one week to promote engagement and excitement, not exhaustion!

Making Room for Nothing
Scale Back and Enjoy the Downtime!

by Lara Krupicka


Most parents have times where they feel like they have to be in multiple places at one time to manage their children's calendars. But what happens when the imagined need becomes real?

Like a typical mom's, Hillary Homzie's schedule for her family was a house of cards, a careful stacking of one activity on the other. Then one day it came toppling down. A change in plans with a carpool partner, when all three of her kids had somewhere to be, left her scrambling. "I remember dropping off one kid at a swim party and not even being able to have the time to arrange how my fifth-grader got home," she explains. She herself had to get to a doctor's appointment where she was diagnosed with multiple ailments, brought on by stress. It was then she realized something had to change.

Homzie's story may sound extreme, but it's more normal than many realize. According to a research study conducted at the University of Michigan, children experienced a major decrease in time spent in unstructured activities between 1981 and 1997. A followup to that study showed free time activities for kids continued to decrease into 2003. With shrinking amounts of down time, you have a recipe for collapse.