For Kids & Adults, An Idle Mind Breeds Creativity

Parenting is under the looking glass this week. Last week’s London Times headline What makes the perfect mum?  is a bit more benign that today’s TIME story: Can These Parents Be Saved: The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting, prompting my story that follows: Over-Parenting, Hyper-Parenting: For Sane Children & Better Marriage Try Slow Parenting.

Back at the London Times, author Helen Rumbelow reviews several research reports on kids evaluating moms. I’m familiar with most of the surveys and agree that there’s a common theme in kids’ answers about mom: mothers worry about the wrong things and rather sadly, kids worry a lot about their moms.

In fact, children have an amazing empathy for their mothers, wishing they didn’t suffer so much, weren’t so stressed, and could enjoy life more and especially time with them. The key word here is ‘enjoy’. 

I go to great pains in Over-Parenting, Hyper-Parenting: For Sane Children & Better Marriage Try Slow Parenting to remind working moms that they actually spend more time with kids now than non-working moms did 40 years ago. (Note: all moms work hard. I speak of paying work here.) And today’s dads spend a lot more time with their kids.

In one of the most credible surveys on American kids “Ask the Children”, by American sociologist Ellen Galinsky, only 10 per cent of children want to spend more time with mom. Moms in the same survey predicted that 50 percent of the kids wanted to spend more time with them.

TED talk by Sir Ken RobinsonReality is that kids wish mom would take some quality time for herself, maybe giving them time to just hang out and play around, to dream and get bored besides. When the mind goes blank or is just being crazy for no purpose, creative and innovative throughts follow.

Creativity experts say that kids must have a blank canvas at times to jumpstart innovative thinking, play and artistic talent. It’s almost back to the days of the Puritans to suggest that every moment of a child’s life should be scheduled.

With all of mom’s lists and double-checking, less than half the Galinsky kids gave their mother an “A” for establishing family routines and rituals. A third of the kids said they worried about mom a lot.

In multiple surveys, eighty percent of kids want their moms to work, although many studies say part-time and the hours aren’t defined.

We’re not a parenting site at Anne of Carversville.

Our focus is persuading women (and men, too) to cut themselves some slack as parents and as women.

We want women to be lovers: of themselves first and foremost, and also their husbands, partners, children, friends and the world beyond the front door.

via Doubleyou with symobls at Flickr.comAll research confirms that when mom loves herself enough, everything else goes so much better in family life and the marriage. Our kids seem to understand this fact of life. I was well aware of this fact as a child and anguished my mother’s wellbeing almost every day.

A child’s empathy for mom changes in some cases. I have good friends with college-age daughters who are incredibly demanding of their them and very selfish in itemizing just what about what mom owes them in life.

For women reading these articles, please don’t think that we’re heaping more blame on you. Actually, we’re trying to give you a more fulfilling life, with all its demanding complexities.

If there’s one thread in all these parenting articles, it’s for mom to take your foot off the gas pedal.

Slow down. Parenting has changed dramatically in the last decade. 

There’s no evidence that kids are any better for the extraordinary efforts of modern moms, and frankly, there’s seriously growing concerns that all parties are in worse shape. That include the woman in charge, the object of our affection. Anne

More reading: That first Flickr photo took us to Sir Ken Robinson and his TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Follow link for more info about Ken Robinson and his TED talk.

Here’s the Robinson TED video Schools Kill Creativity: