HS student time usage: unscheduled leisure

patient
Wed, 29 Dec 2004 23:45:17 +0000

It sounds like with your son, to some extent it is a bit of a solace for him from being away from his friends and in a community where he hasn’t connected as much. My heart goes out to him–it’s hard for boys, I think, to express that they are feeling lonely or isolated and the computer games, plus the opportunity to play on the internet with his old friends, is kind of nice for him. He certainly seems involved and if he is doing well in school, it may just be a matter of time before he finds a “live” group of friends.

On the occasions when I thought that my kids might be watching too much TV or playing too many computer games, I did remark on it to them, but I didn’t force them to do something else. I think that often the kids know themselves that they are spending too much time on it, and they just need someone to tell them and their internal censor comes alive.

At our house, because our younger ones are girls, TV has been a bigger problem than video games and I have had to put a limit on it. At least there is an interactive component to the video games, which is completely lacking in passive TV watching! And the teenage programming is AWFUL.

The problem time for me is summer because of vast amounts of unscheduled time (my fault, really, for not planning ahead better). My solution for next summer is to schedule most of their minutes, because I truly got so sick of coming home to the TV on and dishes in the sink, and I resolved that it wasn’t going to happen again.