Schedule Free Time In Your Family’s Day

Having a busy life is great, but the potential for over-scheduling is a real concern. You probably lead a busy life yourself with family, work, and taking care of your household. Keeping your child busy too may seem like the best thing to do, but there can be too much of a good thing.

Kids are busier than ever. Between a full class schedule during the day and all the extracurricular activities after school, when does a kid have time to relax? It’s important for kids to have interests outside of family and school, but how much is too much?

The bottom line is you need down time and so do your children.

Typical Night at Home

On an average week night, you and your family might not get home until well after 6 o’clock at night. Then it’s time to make dinner while the kids work on their homework, eat dinner, dishes, by then its the kids bedtime routines. If you’re lucky you may find a few minutes to relax in between before hitting the sack yourself. But, before you know it the alarm goes off and you are up and at it again. This schedule, when repeated day in and day out, is hard on you, and it’s hard on your kids.

This is usually how it is all week since the kids are busy with school and you’re busy with work. The weekend’s coming so we can all just relax, right? Wrong. The weekend comes and you have errands and chores. The kids will probably have games or other activities to attend. You find yourself running all weekend just like you did all week.

When is your downtime? From the looks of it, not very often.

Over-Scheduling Can Trigger Other Problems

Being in lots of activities is fun but it’s also stressful. Homework, dinnertime, and fun with the family are important, as well. If everyone is running around a mile a minute to get to the next activity, there won’t be any downtime. When there isn’t any downtime to relax and refresh, stress starts to bubble up and boil over. Parents as well as the kids feel this stress. When kids are asked to be on the go 24/7 they get exhausted too. This stress may even cause your children to lose the motivation to participate in the activities they love.

Schedule Some Time for Relaxing Activities

You’re great at scheduling all your activities, right?  Why not schedule in a bit of slow time for your kids and yourself, as well? Everybody needs day off. You need time to relax and clear your head and so does the rest of your family. Just because kids have all the energy in the world doesn’t mean they don’t need to relax and slow down too. That high energy can fool parents into thinking their kids are always ready to go. It’s your job to give your child some downtime to relax, even when it doesn’t appear they need it.

You can allow your child to participate in many extra-curricular activities throughout the year, but the key is to limit overlapping activities during each season. For instance, your child can enjoy basketball in the summer, track in the spring, and football in the fall. This way your child stays active all year without the overwhelm of trying to do everything all at once. You can also sprinkle in some weekend excursions carefully throughout the year, but for every activity make sure you schedule some good downtime in between. Your child needs unscheduled time, too – time to themselves to listen to music, play games, hang out with friends, doodle, daydream or whatever they like to do to relax.

It doesn’t matter if your scheduled downtime includes a picnic at the park, a family game night or movie home, what’s important is that you and your children learn it’s not only okay to relax, it’s part of your happy and healthy life!