Anna Quindlen Doing Nothing Is Something Summary

571 Words3 Pages
Numerous studies have shown that free play is critical to early childhood development. In her piece “Doing Nothing Is Something” Anna Quindlen calls to attention an escalating threat to our children’s social and cognitive development. In her writing the author begins by recounting the blissful boredom that makes for the most “productive” downtime. Sadly, the story doesn’t end here. Anna Quindlen introduces an emerging trend; parents are attempting to guide their children’s futures at an earlier age by scheduling, quantifying and rationalizing every activity with the lofty goals of future success. While scholars do agree that children benefit from structure, there is also evidence that children benefit from unstructured play, as Ms Quindlen stated. While Ms Quindlen’s position is technically correct, she leaves a lot unsaid. Chief among those untold benefits of play and hazards of over scheduling: the health of the children. Sacrificing playtime in the name of unknown potential success is detrimental to our children’s health.…show more content…
Watching a child battle hordes of imaginary zombies or play a game of freeze tag, you might not think they’re learning anything, let alone that they’re being productive. However, studies conducted by leading children’s psychologists show that children benefit in a number of different ways from playing. Benefits include: learning social interaction, how to govern their emotions, fine motor skills and outside-the-box thinking. Even non humans use play to learn, from kittens learning to stalk and pounce by chasing a laser across the floor, to dogs learning their place in a pack by
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  • Anna Quindlen Doing Nothing Is Something Summary

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    to be more creative? These are the questions I thought about while reading “Doing Nothing Is Something” by Anna Quindlen. In her writing Quindlen refers to down time as downing nothing; like staring into space contemplating life. She also believes that all children need down time to be creative. I agree with her on the point that down time should be spent doing nothing; not the staring in to space kind of nothing, but doing what you want to do as long as it is relaxing too you. As far as our children

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