Here is a great article

Usually I just link to articles, but I thought that this warranted actual publication. I try to read Bob Welch's column every time it published, and I always enjoy what he has to say. If you want to read the actual article, go here.


Bob Welch: The best things in a kid's life are free

By Bob Welch
Columnist, The Register-Guard
Published: Tuesday, January 23, 2007


I saw it Friday night in a Salem neighborhood: a snowman that, based on its oversized stocking cap and muffler, had, before temperatures rose, once been much taller, bulkier and nobler.
A little girl, with a sense of quiet compassion, was transferring the scant remains of snow from other parts of the yard to shore up what looked to be the Snow Lump Formerly Known as Frosty.
If the scene might have discouraged some, it encouraged me: Imagine, I thought, a child acting like a child. That's a rare thing these days.

The trend is quite the opposite - fast-tracking kids to be, in essence, what parents want them to be: scholars, athletes, entertainers. Young adults. Movers and shakers with mouths full of braces. And not allowing them to be what they really want to be at this point in their lives: kids.

Monday's front-page Register-Guard story about simplifying children's birthday parties also was encouraging. Imagine: Parents waking up and realizing that bringing the entire Broadway cast of "Beauty and the Beast" to the house for Madison's 10th birthday might be a bit much.
Kids aren't nearly as impressed with big-ticket items as their parents are. Kids, unless indoctrinated otherwise, just wanna have fun. And the best fun isn't bought.

It's free. It's within every kid. It's called imagination.

I'm not going to quote a family social science professor to convince you of that.
Instead, I'm going to tell you about the looks in the eyes of the first-graders at Prairie Mountain School last week as I read them Taback Simms' "Joseph Had a Little Overcoat." Their eyes were laser beams to the picture pages - this despite books being decidedly low-tech, costing relatively little and, with rare exceptions, unable to morph into some high-tech toy.
I'm going to tell you about the 20Below students I once coached who, by the time they were sophomores, were already stressing about getting into the right college.

I'm going to tell you about my nearly 2-year-old grandson who's been given an array of wonderful toys but is still more fascinated by those whirly things that twirl downward from maple trees.
We've force-fed our kids into believing that their success is dependent on structure, programs, camps, schools. Things we pay for. But it often backfires.

The reason kids don't use their imaginations more is that, instead of writing their own play and performing it on the back deck, they're shuffled off to adult-supervised theater camps.
We've convinced kids that unless they make this elite team or get into that elite school, their lives are doomed. You hardly ever see kids, without adults, playing a pickup baseball game anymore. My kids created a four-kid whiffle ball league that came complete with (self-made) uniforms, a (self-made) scoreboard and a (self-made) newspaper.

We've come to believe that boredom in children is the social equivalent of the Bubonic plague. No, boredom invites invention. Boredom invites imagination. Boredom gently challenges a child to tap into his or her creativity.

But we panic. We offer, instead, television, computer or video games where the imagination comes built-in and say: Here, interact with this - instead of handing the child a video camera and saying: here, make your own movie. Or, here's a computer, write your own book. Or, as we did at one birthday party, here's a backyard and two sacks of marshmallows. Pick them up when the mallow-war is over.

An MSN story on the Web says spending for kids' birthday parties "has been rising steadily over the past several years as parents have looked for ways to connect with their kids."

A word of advice for such folks: Wanna connect with your kid? For starters, let that kid be one.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at bwelch@guardnet.com.