Are we asking too much of our children’s time?

I recently wrote an article for a secondary education magazine entitled “How UCAS killed childhood”. It takes the form of a spoof UCAS (the University admissions organisation) personal statement in which an exasperated teenager lists all the things he should have done in order to improve his chances of accessing a top university, but did not do because he is in fact a normal teenager.

You can read the article here: www.sec-ed.co.uk

Over the past 20 years I have seen the expectations rise for older teenagers, to a point where it would take several sets of teenage years to fulfil them all. To access the best universities, we are told, applicants must no longer simply get outstanding grades and have a passion for their chosen field. They have to demonstrate that passion in all sorts of ways, from attending conferences to volunteering or undertaking work experience placements to name a few.

If one were indeed to volunteer regularly, do relevant work experience, read around the subject, and attend conferences and talks, when exactly should they find the time to complete their homework and revise for their examinations in order to attain the necessary top grades? Let’s for a moment assume that a teenager can, however, achieve all this. Is this single-minded dedication actually good for their mental health? I suggest not.

Research tells us that we all need down-time: time to relax, distract ourselves, and socialise. Now parents may often disapprove of some of the ways in which teenagers achieve these things: online socialisation via virtual channels, for example, may seem like a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction and there is indeed much research that would support this view. However it is perhaps a sign of the times that online socialisation has replaced face-to-face interaction. After all, sending messages from their own bedroom allows teenagers to make the most of the fragments of time available to them in a way that travelling to a friend’s house for an afternoon would not.

Older teenagers with university on their minds are not the only ones with excessive pressures on their time. Tutoring in secondary schools has become commonplace, and we are now seeing many children in Years 6, 5 and even earlier being tutored. This young tutoring is often not aimed at addressing difficulties in specific subjects. As in the case of our university applicants, it is often to try to gain admission to the ‘best’ secondary schools or the ‘best’ sixth forms. It is a parental arms race which is harming the mental health of our children.

Young children need even more down-time than older ones. The younger the child, the more each experience is important to them and the more cognitive effort they use to process it. One side-effect of early tutoring therefore is to overload young children with very targeted learning experiences – such as completing a non-verbal reasoning paper – which will indeed help them complete further reasoning papers but will not necessarily add anything to their repertoire of transferable skills. The other side effect is that it removes children from their families, and that is where some of the most useful learning experiences take place. Whether it’s cooking with your child or telling them a story about their grandparents, interaction with parents and sibling – interaction within the family – is a hugely valuable learning experience. Keeping children ‘busy’ with clubs, sports, organised activities, tutors, and revision classes will detract from that valuable time and from parents’ enjoyment of their family as well.

It seems perhaps contradictory to find an article such as this on a site that offers Academic Coaching. After all, would that not also be yet another demand on children’s time? In the short-term, yes. But that is the point: Academic Coaching is a short-term intervention. We teach your children the transferable skills they need to succeed academically, and do so in a very short time. Whilst some children are tutored for three years prior to taking the 11+ examination, sometimes several times a week, Academic Coaching will generally be able to train your child in the skills they need to improve in a just a handful of sessions. After that, the occasional session to reinforce key skills and messages may be required – but the rest of your family time is yours, and your children will be able to relax and enjoy life a little more.