Keeping holiday bodies and brains active
Exercise is important for their brains.
As well as having positive effects on mood and physical health, boosting your child’s fitness levels will keep their minds sharp. Even half an hour of activity when your heart rate is up improves concentration levels and speed of learning and decision-making, and processing in the pre-frontal cortex for at least two hours. And that has a cumulative effect. Simply saying, “Go for a run!” can demotivate children. Inspire children by setting little challenges where they’re trying for personal bests. Try seeing if they can run from their home town to where another town where grandparents live by working out the distance and running a little of it in the park every day. Or they could compete with a family member to see who can run 5k in the best time.
Don’t ban the Xbox.
Gaming is not always time wasted. Many multiplayer games value teamwork, strategic thinking and other social skills, which will help our children to negotiate school and indeed life. In Minecraft children might help their friends to gain resources and defeat a dragon; playing Fortnite during lockdown has helped many children to stay connected with their friends. In much of life now we do better when we work as team. Get children to consciously think about the group dynamic by asking our young gamers: “What do you like about what your team players do? What do you find annoying?”
These games are designed to give children a feeling of self-competency. They get to level up every few minutes. They get the right amount of challenge. But, satisfying though that is, we don’t want them to leave the summer with the sense that they only felt good about themselves when they levelled up in video games. As parents, just make sure they have other skills they’re working on to become more capable and secure, whether it’s cooking, running, cycling or helping with chores.
Send your teenagers on a hike with a proper map.
Bolster confidence and resilience by giving them a map and sending them on a hike. Try other challenging outdoor activities, such as surfing, paddle-boarding or canoeing.
Ask your 14-year-old to recommend audiobooks.
Books need to be what they want to read, and how they want to read. They need to choose the content and format, whether they prefer to read by e-book or paperback. Audiobooks are a great way for young teenagers to plug their earphones in and get off the screen. Sometimes parents can feel that it’s not proper reading, but the science behind it would suggest that it prompts much of the same work inside the brain as if you were reading the book. You can support them by getting them an audiobook account and listening to their favourites. They can bring books to you, not just the other way around. It’s a lovely insight into what your teenager’s thinking and feeling as well.
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Reintroduce a civilised bedtime.
Children’s brains are developing and sleep is essential for their emotional wellbeing and cognition. 11-year-olds should get approximately 9½ hours’ sleep; 12 and 13-year-olds about 9 hours and 15 minutes; and 14 to 16-year-olds about 9.
Establish a time, including the child in the discussion (“What time makes sense to you?”), on weeknights at least, when devices go downstairs and they go to bed. Don’t leave it until the last week of the holidays to restore good sleeping habits. Like when we change time zones, our body clock can’t jump instantly — it needs time to adjust. If we try to do it all at once, it can cause problems with sleep and concentration, just like severe jet-lag.
We can help teenagers to reset their body clocks by exposing them to sunlight in the morning — and if we can’t tempt them out of bed, open the curtains. It allows them to wake naturally by the light.
Encourage every writing opportunity, from shopping lists to journals.
To get younger children to practise their writing skills you could ask them to write down your shopping list. Or you could suggest they make up their own board game or garden assault course — and ask them to write down the rules. Teenagers enjoy experimenting with blog writing or what they post on social media but they have to feel motivated.
Watch films with subtitles (even the ones in English).
Children often read much faster on the screen than they would normally. Watching subtitled foreign programmes is also an effective method of surreptitiously brushing up on language skills. It’s an excellent way to be exposed to the language spoken by a native speaker in a conversational way.
How to help your fidgety five-year-old.
One of the best ways parents can get young children — four and five-year-olds — ready for school, is to keep them physically active and busy over summer. Activities that focus on motor development are really useful. Fiddly stuff, like bead threading, pasta on a necklace, Lego, Meccano, glueing twigs together, are good for writing because they improve the fine motor skills. Developing balance is a key skill for young children and is achieved by working on gross motor skills and muscle strength. Walking along a skipping rope as an imaginary tight rope, or walking along a wall, climbing, standing on one leg, learning how to bounce on a space hopper — that’s great for balance and core stability.
Do some engineering projects with your 12-year-old.
Lots of children are bursting to get outside and do some practical learning. They throw themselves into design and engineering projects where they can get out in the garden and be more active.
Try the 44 ingenious science challenges from engineers at Dyson, such as working out how to make an egg fit into a bottle without breaking it (jamesdyson foundation.co.uk). You can also plan and design projects around the home like a new garden or gate.
Acknowledgement: Anna Maxted, The Times, July 11 2020