Why we have forgotten how to get high from communicating with children, and homework won cookies

Business time, fun hour, playing with the child - a minute, homework - night hours. Convinced that time with children should be developing, we gave up pleasant leisure in favor of strange experiments with starch and morphological analysis of the word "apple". And drove ourselves into a trap. But our columnist, journalist Inna Pribora seems to know how to get out of it. With the advent of the digital age, time has become the most expensive resource. At any time, we can choose what to do: we have the best TV shows, new music, masterpieces of the gaming industry, scientific lectures and podcasts about art. Everything is instant and almost always free. The Internet gave us other opportunities as well: for example, work from home and even use cws.org, from the playground and from that birthday, where all the guests are in unicorn costumes. It's good when you can choose - to conduct business correspondence, hang around on social networks or post those same unicorns. However, the more opportunities appeared, the sharper the understanding came: to whom much is given, from that much will be demanded.

In the 2010s, the style of education in developed countries finally turned to intensive. This is a funny word that sociologists call a child-centered approach. It requires a lot of investments from adults: emotional, financial, and primarily temporary. An important point of this approach: we are sincerely confident that our parenting actions will determine how high the child will achieve in learning, how healthy his psyche and body will be, and how successfully he will be able to realize his potential. The sacred cow here is time with the child. When technology is cheap, and cartoons can entertain a person endlessly, we attach particular importance to the influence of a living person. The screen is a surrogate for development, and the real luxury is to make clay men with their mother, who sings a folk song at the same time Live communication becomes no less valuable when all family members finally leave the decree. The younger spends more and more time in lessons and in circles, now he needs not only evening reading and the standard question "How are you at school?" Since we are responsible for what happens to a person, we understand that we need to include heart-to-heart conversations in the schedule (emotional development - it was not in vain that we read the psychologist's column!), Common household chores (we develop responsibility), a museum (cultural program), joint walks (how can we do without fresh air?), games and ... uh, wait. How so - haven't done my homework yet? Our requirements for the ideal are great, because together with responsibility we see opportunities. It would seem that everything is at hand, but the more choice, the sooner you get lost: it is always difficult to make a choice. It is more usual to sit down to homework. For some reason, it seems to everyone that this is also a useful leisure, although, to be honest, he did not stand next to the production of cookies. I'm not even talking about clay sausages.