Misspent Leisure

"A sound schooling," wrote novelist Norman Douglas, "should teach manner of thought rather than matter. It should have a dual aim -- to equip a man for hours of work, and for hours of leisure. They interact; if the leisure is misspent, the work will suffer." 

In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt connects modern parenting trends and smartphone proliferation to the alarming, and well-documented, spike in childhood mental illness over the past couple decades. I'm on his bandwagon when it comes of over-protective, fear-based parenting. Today's children are spending virtually one hundred percent of their lives under adult supervision, mostly indoors, and with very little actual freedom compared to past generations. This is simply a recipe for anxiety and depression, not to mention basic life-skill incompetence, which, naturally, further feeds anxiety and depression.

I'm not as sure about the impact of smartphones on mental health. Much of his argument centers around the fact that these devices are "rewiring" our children's brains, which can be said of any and every technology that has ever become widespread. The locomotive rewired our brains. The printing press, electric lights, and the phonetic alphabet likewise changed what it means to be human. The concerning thing about smartphones for me, and this is equally true for adults as young children, is that they have become the leisure activity of choice for many of us. 

That said, there is a fairly wide variety of good things being done via the smartphone, including connecting with friends and colleagues via texting, email, and talking, listening to music, banking, research, reading, taking pictures and shooting videos, shopping, navigating, gaming, scheduling, tracking health goals, and, I'm sure, dozens of other things of which I'm ignorant. None of these things in and of themselves are a "misspent" use of time. The concerning part is that these are all things that once involved distinct behaviors and experiences. Now it's all delivered through apps operated by thumbs while hunched over a tiny screen. Even if our kids would rather jump on their bikes to hang out with their friends, go to the library, listen to live music, shop in actual stores, or play pick-up basketball at the neighborhood park, modern parenting (and the laws that have grown from modern parenting fears) makes that difficult if not impossible. It seems to me that smartphone use is a symptom of this problem, rather than a cause.

I doubt that the world is any more dangerous than it was when I was a boy growing up outdoors and largely unsupervised during the 1960s (in fact, today's crime rates in the US are more or less similar to those of 1965). But the perception that the world is too dangerous for childhood independence has taken such deep root in both popular consciousness and contemporary law that I have no expectation that we can return to past parenting practices any time soon. What that means to me is that it's on our schools, the only place in society we set aside for childhood, to take a step back from preparing children from those "hours of work" and focus more on those "hours of leisure" in order to help ensure that our children's free time won't be "misspent." 

Haidt and my friends Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray are doing good work right now through their non-profit Let Grow, helping schools create opportunities for childhood independence. But there is so much more our schools could and should be doing. The antidote to anxiety and depression isn't found in a tiny screen operated by thumbs, but rather in allowing curiosity to guide us into a wide variety of self-selected ideas and activities, from cooking and sports to crafts and dance. Even more importantly is that to truly find happiness our children need to be free to engage their curiosity without the constant judgmental gaze of adults. 

The Ancient Greek word for "school" is scholē, which translates as "leisure" or "free time". The stereotype of modern children is that we can't allow them too much free time because all they'll do is waste it on their phones. Maybe that's because that's all we've left them. Maybe it's because when they're "inside" their phones it's the only time they have a modicum of freedom from adult supervision, judgement, and evaluation. Maybe it's because all they learn in school is how to set their curiosity aside to focus on those hours of work leaving them ill-equipped for those vital hours of leisure. 

Douglas writes, "(Schooling) should enable a man to extract as much happiness as possible out of his spare time. The secret of happiness, given good health, is curiosity." And the way we learn to happily use our hours of leisure is to be free to follow our curiosity wherever it takes us, which is to say, to play.

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