Please Let Children Be Children

Kids need room to struggle, and time to do nothing.

I am supposed to be the expert. Yet when my six-year-old granddaughter gives me that look and asks for a second chocolate, and her three-year-old sister copies her, I hand over two. Their mother is not amused.

I know what I should do. After more than 40 years in education, I have told parents that children need to hear the word “no”, to lose sometimes and to solve their own problems. Then my granddaughters appear, and the theory quietly leaves the room.

It seems the girls have already worked out how the system runs. Yesterday they handed me their list for Santa, and some of the requests were rather outrageous, including a pink pony with a long tail. I must accept some of the blame. I had told them to write to him well in advance because the jolly old man gets very busy, and they took my advice very seriously. Perhaps Santa needs a gentle word with Grandpa.

It also made me think about how different their childhood is from my own. When we were growing up, children were simply allowed to be children. On holidays we played outside until it got dark, and then we knew it was time to go home, or there could be repercussions. We cried, we were rewarded, we were sometimes told no, and we learned about boundaries without anyone having to explain them. We were noisy and messy and entirely ourselves, and we learned about the world by living in it. I do not say that was better. It was just different.

Childhood today is different again, and much of it is lived in a hurry. In neighbourhoods across the UAE, we rush our children from an improvement class to a game to another activity. Every one of these things may be worthwhile, but put them all together and children can end up exhausted, and so can their parents. I say this with sympathy because I understand exactly why we do it. We want the best for them.

As a principal, I often spoke about this, and one moment has stayed with me. I once asked a pupil, “When do you just lie on your bed or sit on the sofa and do nothing?” She gave me a look that said, quite clearly, “Are you mad?” At least, that is how I read it.

Her parents later told me why. She ate a meal in the car on the way from one activity to the next and changed her clothes there too. It was one mad rush, six days a week. She was a real go-getter, and so were her parents, but she often looked tired, sometimes exhausted. I have never forgotten it.

Even the most motivated child needs time to stop, breathe and simply be.

Doing nothing has become almost unthinkable, for children and increasingly for adults too. Yet quiet time is not wasted time. It is when the mind gets a chance to rest, and when a child invents a game, wonders about something or simply thinks. We know what constant pressure can do to a child’s mood, sleep and joy in learning.

We say we want our children to be resilient, but resilience only grows when there is something to recover from. I have watched parents become quite worked up over a squabble between two children at play, something the children themselves had forgotten within minutes.

I understand it. Love makes it hard to watch a child struggle.

But a child who falls, gets up and discovers that falling did not destroy them has learned something no lecture can teach. And a child with no spare time has little room to fall, or to get up.

So where does that leave our schools? They have changed remarkably in my time, and that progress gives us the confidence to ask a gentle question: are we preparing children for the world they will inherit, or for the one we grew up in?

The world they are growing into will not run on timetables. I relied on the bulky Encyclopedia Britannica, and ChatGPT, Claude and other tools are a big improvement. I would not go back. But when answers arrive in seconds, the skills that matter most are the human ones: asking good questions, judging whether something is true, listening, disagreeing respectfully, saying sorry and admitting, “I was wrong.”

None of these appear on an examination paper, and most of them grow in unhurried time.

Perhaps we could start small. One afternoon a week with nothing planned, and see what our children do with it.

We cannot prepare them for every possible future. The best gift we can give them is not another qualification or another carefully planned activity, but the confidence to ask questions, make decisions and cope when things do not go to plan. Sometimes it is simply an empty afternoon.

I say that as an educator, and, rather more humbly, as a grandfather of two little girls who knows exactly what he should do and occasionally does the opposite.