It’s the Easter Holidays! 

That time of year (like all holidays) when parents wonder how they will keep the kids out from under their feet until school starts again.

“What are you doing over Easter?” I ask at the school gates, before leaving half an hour later, ears ringing with a machine gun barrage of scheduled activities that make a state visit to Australia look like a lazy weekend by the sea.  Tennis coaching, extra maths lessons, chess camp, followed by the Natural History Museum, a couple of galleries, and a crash course in Mandarin.  The list of activities that parents have organised is exhausting to listen to, let alone to undertake.

For a while I was intimidated by this, and thought we should be doing the same. I’d spend weeks organising swimming lessons and day trips, and trying to shoe-horn play dates into the equally frantic diaries of my children’s friends.  By the end of the break the kids were more tired than before it started, and I had made a mockery of the definition of “holiday”.  An “extended period of leisure” it most certainly was not.

I wonder too whether this is indicative of our constant need to educate our children.  That sense that extra-curricular activities, homework and clubs are the only way to give our kids the edge over the competition.  Perhaps they are, but I think we are at risk of filling their brains with too much, too soon, for fear that we aren’t doing our very best for them.

I don’t remember this when I was a child.  We wouldn’t dream of moaning that we were “bored” because we had not been forcibly entertained from dawn till dusk.  Should that word ever fall from my lips, our formidable Great Aunt Gertrude would tell us to find a book, and read ourselves a story.  And trust me, you don’t mess with Gert.

I’m not knocking the idea of taking the kids out on a day trip – we do that too. It’s the regimented, almost competitive amount of organised enjoyment that I struggle with.  It just doesn’t sound, well, fun?

Fortunately I came to my senses and these days our sports clubs are balanced by a healthy dose of doing absolutely nothing at all.  My favourite day is when I ask the kids what they would like to do, and they yell: “PAJAMA DAY!!!” before leaping back into their beds with snacks and books.  We will mess around, be silly, play games and have fun.  Doing really not very much at all.  It’s blissful.

As Christopher Robin said to Pooh:

“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”