Society is plagued by this mentality today that in order to be a healthy and productive citizen your life should contain the following:

• A moderately well-paying salary which you earn by working 12 to 14 hours per day
• The willingness to forego vacations in order to meet the demands of your job
• Six hours of sleep a night
• A willingness to work weekends and sacrifice time with the family, as well as free time

This mentality is making our society miserable and can be directly attributed to the rise in divorce and depression in this country.  To make matters worse, this mentality is being passed on to our children, who now grow up with structured lives very much like our own.

School, extracurricular activities (usually three or four per child), homework, and maybe an hour or so of television make up the schedule of a typical child these days.  Children live their day according to the clock.  They get out of bed each morning and know exactly what they have to do that day.  Not only is adult depression on the rise from this type of living, but it is increasing in occurrence in children as well; children who aren’t being given a chance to be children.

Whatever happened to the days when kids went to school; maybe had one extracurricular activity they participated in (chess club, football, basketball, gymnastics), and were free by five o’clock to finish up their homework and spend the rest of the evening playing?  What’s more, their weekends weren’t bombarded with a to-do list of things that needed to be done.

There was a time when children could expect to sleep in on Saturdays, get up and watch a few hours of Saturday Morning Cartoons, and then go outside and roam the neighborhood all day and just be kids.  This is the type of lifestyle many adults had as kids, so it’s strange that they wouldn’t want the same for the children today.

However, what has happened is that we’ve all gotten tied up in the rat race of life and forgotten about the most important part of living, both for ourselves and children—having fun.  The following link provides some great insight into the growing occurrence of over structured living and children:

http://www.happynews.com/news/10172006/down-time-healthy-kids.htm.  It provokes interesting thoughts about just how shifted family priorities are today.

About the Author - David Benton is a freelance writer and the sole owner of DM Writing and Editing Services (http://www.dmweservices.com/). He lives in the Central Valley of California with his wife and two dogs. He can be reached at dm42603 [at] aol.com.

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