Summer Games
When COVID 19 hit, parents didn’t know what to do to fill all the extra hours of unscheduled time for their kids. During that stretch, kids were glued to their phones, tablets and game consoles. With things loosening up, parents will revert back to the pre-Covid craziness of over-scheduling their kids again, lining them up for tutoring, music classes, sports… the full boat.
We oughta hold on and give the kids a break once in a while. Give ‘em time to be bored. That’s the best way to kickstart imagination and creativity—no schedule, no screens. The younger generation constantly feels the pressure to be accomplished, to be winners. Gotta stand out for college admissions and sports scholarships. And that starts really young today. That’s why so many kids feel so much stress.
Send ‘em to a therapist or put ‘em on Ritalin? No, let ‘em play.
Hey, all this stuff is no guarantee of success. Kids get sick and tired of all these year-round sports camps and private coaching they have been forced to attend and they end up quitting. Let ‘em play. Long-range, developing imagination and creativity will probably do them more good.
The other day I saw a photo of two New York City kids playing street hockey. And not with slick stuff they bought at Dick’s. They were playing with a broom as a stick and two beat-to-hell traffic cones as goal posts. Looked like they were having a helluva time.
During the summer Olympics when I was a kid, we made things up and had our own goofball Olympics. We’d take a big bamboo pole that came inside a rug my mother got. We’d use that as the bar for the high jump and pole vault. The pole vault never went too well because the pine tree pole would always bust on your way up.
One time one of my buddies was about to leap at the high jump and a neighbor’s dog bit him on the way up. No leash law in Holyoke then. The shotput was a big round boulder and the hammer throw was another whopper of a boulder with a rope tied around it. Track and field were races run on Ashley Reservoir roads.
We’d be doing this wackball Olympics for days. Like I said, when we had nothing to do, we made stuff up. Once in a while give kids some boring, nothing-to-do time and see how resourceful they get. Watch where their imagination takes them. That’s what’s really fun to see. Keep your dukes up.