Last week, a friend invited me to a screening of the movie “Race to Nowhere.” She prepped me a little but I didn’t really know what it was about. In my own words, the movie was a wake-up call for parents because of all the activities, schoolwork, and pressure kids have piled on top of them. Some of the kids in the movie were suffering from headaches, stomach aches, sleeplessness, and more. The kids in the movie go to school seven hours a day, then have tutoring, then have soccer practice or something, and then have four more hours of homework a night.
Although I am not at this stage yet with my kids, I can see how it can just keep piling on and piling on until you don’t really know how to stop it. Although your household might not be to that extreme, it was a good reminder for me that our kids still need to be kids a bit. Letting them run around in the yard or at the park and having to deal with other people, working in groups, playing on their own for a bit could be as important to their education as math drills.
