HEALTH PLUS:Quality time spent cooking or gardening with your little ones will do wonders for their imagination, writes Marie Murray.
THE PRIMARY schools have closed and the long summer stretches ahead. The early morning rush and routine is suspended. The school drives and collections have ended. Uniforms have been sent for dry cleaning to hang in pristine solitude at the back of the wardrobe for the summer months. Schoolbags lie beneath them. Days are long. Nights are bright. There is a different tone to life. The holidays are here.
There are no more last-minute searches for mud-encrusted sports gear or sandwich-smeared, dog-eared copybooks crouching at the end of bags. There are no more notes to be signed, PT meetings to attend or torturous homework sessions to monitor each day. The tyranny of term-time family life is paused in favour of another pace. With or without sunshine, summer is a special time.
It is a time of opportunity in parent-child connections. It is a time for children to be children, to be non-competitive in their activities, to be exploratory in their actions, to be creative in their games, to be relaxed in their lives, to be busy with the occupations of childhood and embedded in the world of the child. It is a time to be with parents. In a child's junior school life, there are perhaps 60 weeks of summertime: significant in the emotional life of the child if this time is used well.
For some parents, summertime simply poses the problem of childminding and of occupying young, active and energetic minds. Some parents are forced to encroach on the generosity of grandparents or family members for childminding and support. Some enrol their children in sequential day camps. Each day can be a juggle when both parents work outside of home. Parents can feel angry, burdened, guilty, deprived and aware of the need to have some time with their children as a family during the summer months.
But whether or not parents can spend some, much or all of the summertime with their children, most parents will have some time with them. There are Bank Holiday weekends and annual leave to be taken when the family holiday is planned. Whatever the time available to parents, how that time is used can fashion children's memories of their childhood summers, their experiences of childhood and their perceptions of life. Summertime spent at home deserves more attention than it receives in terms of the psychological opportunities it provides for parent and child.
Many homes will have a jigsaw with its pieces permanently spread out over summer so that bits can be added on impulse, or there can be more concentrated work on sections children have chosen to complete. Many parents provide a camera for children to observe life's detail through its lens. Many gather boxes of dressing-up clothes for evening performances, scripted, directed and produced by their children's imaginative minds. Drawing materials are essential for summertime. Children who are given gardening implements are not just given an activity for life, but the opportunity to create and observe life itself as it unfolds.
Books identifying plants and birds bring children into extra communication with the world. Anything that involves making something increases self- esteem. Day hikes are adven- turous and win every time.
Cooking provides incidental learning: deciding what to cook, gathering implements, measuring precisely, arranging carefully, timing the oven accurately and seeing the outcome of one's work. Children love it. It carries a meaning for them to nurture their family with what they have made.
Children do not need the holiday abroad, the luxury villas, the theme parks, expensive activities, gourmet food and constant entertainment of the packaged kind. Parents do not need to exhaust themselves keeping their children occupied. What seems to be of most benefit to children is that they are given time during summertime: time to think, time to explore, time to be curious, time to observe, time to understand that boredom is lack of creativity and is overcome by imaginative activity.
Creating the conditions conducive for psychological growth means spending time talking to children, asking them about their lives, listening to them, being in their presence and letting them spend time safely alone.
Children cherish time with their parents. Home is a holiday when parents are relaxed, when "the living is easy", when life is uncomplicated and when the odd sunny day can magically stretch into an eternity of memories of those long, lazy, sunny summers of childhood.
Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD