Authors argue kids need time alone

Many parents feel guilty about taking time for themselves, without realizing that when a parent takes time for themselves it is not only beneficial for them, but for their child as well. In the articles Parents Kids and Time Alone by Margaret Paul and Kids Need Time for Themselves by Peggy Drexler have many similar points that, while expressed differently, work to make the point that time alone is actually beneficial to a child and helps them to grow into a more self-sufficient adult. Both articles argue that when a child’s time is constantly filled for them, it stifles their ability to entertain themselves. The articles also agree on the point that when a child is given all of their parents time it causes the child to feel that others are responsible for filling their time for them, and it causes the child to be whiny, demanding, and easily bored. A third point that the articles agree on is that children should be taught at an early age the importance of being alone. However, the article Kids Need Time for Themselves makes one point that isn’t made in Parents Kids and Time Alone, which is that in an attempt to keep children from becoming bored and to work off some energy by constantly keeping their children entertained, some parents actually do more harm than good because the children then actually even look at alone time as a punishment. While both articles effectively make basically the same point, by the use of real life examples, Kids Need Time for Themselves author Peggy Drexler argues the point better than Parents Kids and Time Alone author Margaret Paul does.

            Many parents today, due to long work hours or as an attempt to stave off boredom in their young children, spend every free moment they have with them. Playing sports or video games, taking them to the park or a movie or a live sporting event. On the surface this seems like a good idea and a show of loving parenting. But in both articles the authors discuss how this can actually be harmful to a child’s emotional development. In Parents Kids and Time Alone author Margaret Paul states that this behavior gives a child bad role modeling. It teaches them to be dependent on others to fill their time and inhibits them from finding out what activities they enjoy on their own. This is a good argument, but it lacks depth due to the absence of either hard fact or something to relate it to real life. Whereas in Kids Need Time for Themselves, author Peggy Drexler makes the same point, but she uses the real life example of Tommy, a seven year old boy whose mother is always filling up his time with “boy things”. As stated in the article, when Tommy gets home from school every day he asks his mother “what do we do now”? And every day his mother, Maggie, has an activity planned, and she always stops whatever she’s doing at the time to do the activity with Tommy until his father gets home from work and can then take over. Because his parents always have activities planned, which they put before everything else, Tommy never has to think of activities himself. Drexler relates this act of spoiling children with time to spoiling children with material goods, and says it has the same effect of creating a spoiled adult.