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Productivity
Help Your Child or Teenager Move Toward Happy Productivity
Productivity makeover step 1: slow down and find balance
Posted March 9, 2016
Confidence and happy productivity are built on competence, on grappling with the challenges that lead to expertise. If your child or teenager can’t seem to connect with any enthusiasms or interests, and doesn’t engage in challenging learning opportunities at school or elsewhere, you may want to consider helping them with a productivity make-over.
The first step toward happy productivity may surprise you. In order to encourage your child or teenager to become more actively engaged in meaningful efforts in one area or another, try encouraging him to step back and slow down. Even better, do the same in your own life. This step-back-slow-down approach can be particularly valuable if your lives have been over-scheduled, rushing from one activity to another.
Here are seven questions to ask yourself in order to initiate a productivity make-over. Your answers can help create a healthy balance in which you and the other members of your family can thrive, and move toward engagement in activities that lead to happy productivity.
1. Is there enough time in the day for playful exploration? It’s through engaging with others in games of their own devising that kids learn to make decisions wisely, manage their emotions, see things from others’ perspectives, sort out conflicts, and make friends. Other benefits of unstructured playful exploration include better self-regulation, self-awareness, and collaboration skills; greater ownership of one’s own learning; and a freer imagination. These are the building blocks of happy productivity across the life span.
Action: Free up time in whatever ways you can. Encourage your child’s curiosity, playfulness, sociability and deep desire to learn by assigning a top priority to playtime. This may mean reducing the emphasis on organized sports, homework, lessons, and practice.
2. What about going outside? Outdoor time increases well-being in every area: psychological, physical, cognitive, and creative. Time in nature expands the imagination; stimulates all the senses; frees the spirit; and makes a person calmer, more optimistic, healthier, and more creative. It enhances academic success by improving attention and focus. Kids who spend time outdoors are calmer, more optimistic, healthier, more creative, and more successful at school than those who don’t.
Action: Get some outdoor time every day. An hour outside every day is great, but even if it’s only a twenty-minute walk to the store, you and your child will experience many benefits, including stress reduction and increased sense of well-being, both of which support happy productivity. Even when the weather is bad—hot, cold, windy, wet—you’ll feel better if you dress for it and spend time outside, and so will your child.
3. Is screentime gobbling up every free minute? Although technology has a useful place in young people’s lives, too much time on screens (computer games, social media, television, etc.) encourages lazy habits of mind. In addition to the problems of bullying, attention distortion, and addiction that are experienced by some kids who spend too much time online, a child or teenager who depends on entertainment and activities created by others never learns to discover and explore her own interests.
Action: Set limits. Depending on the age of your child, do this unilaterally (up to age five or so), or (as she gets older) in discussion with her. You can set a limit of a total number of minutes per day, and/or a time window during which screens are allowed. You can give extra screentime as a reward (for homework completion, say, or household tasks done well, or actions above and beyond what’s expected), and you can subtract screentime as a consequence for behaviour you want to see changed (ignoring family regulations, for example, or rude behaviour, or unfriendly actions toward siblings).
Action bonus: Monitor your own screen use, too. If you’re multi-tasking on your phone while you’re with your kids, you’re training them to tune you out, too. Try to be as present as possible when you’re together.
4. Do you place a high enough value on downtime and sleep? Ample time for doing nothing—the ‘restful neural processing’ that occurs when we’re daydreaming and dawdling—is essential to self-discovery, learning, and creativity. Similarly, getting enough sleep is essential to health, energy, and productivity. This is true for adults, but it’s critical to kids’ longterm development.
Action: Give yourself permission for downtime and sleep, and encourage your child to experience the same. Through modeling and active encouragement, help your child welcome downtime as an opportunity for exploration, reflection, consolidation of learning, creativity, and regeneration.
5. Does your home environment support good coping skills? Mindful breathing and other coping techniques contribute to self-regulation, which underlies achievement and success in every area of life. Mindfulness habits increase a person’s ability to concentrate on tests, calm anxieties, and cope with challenging situations. Although mindfulness is effective for managing attention deficits, anxiety issues, and autism, it’s also powerful for everyone else.
Action: Practice mindfulness techniques, and teach them to your child. Breathe deeply when you notice yourself stressed, or see signs of anxiety in the people around you. Listen—really listen!—to your children, your environment, and yourself. Think—and take at least one deep thoughtful breath—before you speak. Help your child acquire these habits, too.
6. What dominates: criticism and entitlement, or appreciation and gratitude? People who feel entitled are habitually critical. Nothing is good enough, and they’re focused on the half-emptiness of life. Those who feel grateful, on the other hand, and who express their appreciation, score higher than others on measures of well-being, energy, optimism, empathy, and popularity. Simply put, those with an attitude of gratitude are happier, better liked, and more likely to be successful in every area of their lives than those who feel entitled.
Action: Model an attitude of gratitude. When parents express their appreciation for the small gifts of everyday life—sunshine, cooperation, food, time together with loved ones—they help their children achieve an attitude of gratitude. This opens the way for possibilities that lead to happy productivity across the life span.
7. Is it time to seek help? There are many reasons for a young person to avoid activities and challenges, some of which can be addressed by the approaches described here. Sometimes, however, a lack of engagement indicates deeper problems, and requires professional help. If you’re not sure what’s going on, and have concerns about your child’s social or emotional development, consider talking to a psychologist or other counsellor who specializes in dealing with young people.
Balance is key to raising kids who will grow up to be happily productive adults. It’s important that young people experience lots of stimulation, challenge, and learning, but it’s just as important they have ample time for free play, nature, reflection, imagination, and even boredom.
For more on these topics:
‘Organic Play,’ by Kristen Paral, Intelligent Nest
‘How Nature Makes Kids Calmer, Healthier, Smarter,’ by Laura Markham
‘Play Outside! Twelve Ways to Health, Happiness, Creativity, and to Environmental Sustainability,’ by Dona Matthews
‘Overwhelmed Moms Choose NOT to Be Busy,’ by Jacoba Urist
‘Exercising the Mind to Treat Attention Deficits,’ by Daniel Goleman
For more resources on supporting children’s optimal development:
Beyond Intelligence: Secrets for Raising Happily Productive Kids, by Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster
Many of these ideas were originally published in a blog I posted for Psychology Today in 2014, called ‘Too Busy to Play?’ I’ve updated that posting here as the first in a series, The Productivity Makeover.
