Families that don't do anything with children

I really really really hope that you're not some sort of Family Worker or intervention worker. If you are and you're asking this question you have training needs.

Exactly. My two daughters married well doing men but when I came here, I started taking the kids walking down the road, meeting the neighbours, telling the kids : tomorrow we will be playing a ball game at around 11 , come why not. Then exchanged food and recipes with the older ones. As I observe and read the news I understand we live in a safe small town but still

I honestly think loads of it is laziness and screen time.
Much easier to entertain your children and not have to go out and about doing things if they have iPads and computer consoles to be stuck to.

My children are 10 and 6, Im always looking for free stuff to do, some of the time my kids will say they don't want to go out or do anything (mainly 10 year old) but always always enjoy it when they're there. Of course we have some rest days but if we spend too much time at home they just end up fighting!

DD's friends seem to be on Minecraft or roblox all day every day

We travel on buses all the time - kids love them.

Does daylight and movement in the garden not count? Is it a special type of daylight outside the fence?

I’m a homebody, always have been since I was a child myself.

I now have a child of my own now and we spend a lot of time in the house, may be boring to some but we get up to a lot of activities :

Baking
Dance Parties
Gardening (grow a lot of veg in our garden)
Crafts, like painting, Crochet, paper mache, pottery
Read books together
Make forts out of blankets and throw picnics inside

If we didn’t have a dog to walk I’d easily spend a whole week at home without realising as the days go by so quickly as we’re just kept occupied - understand this isn’t for everyone though

Mine have been at the bouldering wall with me and their auntie all afternoon and when next door asked what they'd been up to the six year old said "We went to the shop".

Same wee rat has had a week with his big sister walking him all over the city to every free thing she could find, a week in granny's being let away with blue murder, a week at home with his great uncle building a damn den in the garden for them, three weeks of summer club with his after school scheme, and next week will be going on holiday. And I guarantee the only thing he will tell anyone will be that he went to the duck pond with his big sister the last day of school and she dropped her coat in it.

Yup. We never got into the out every day routine, because we didn’t need to. What we were doing was working, no one was miserable, or tantruming or climbing the walls. Well DD did have a climbing the door frames stage at some point, pretending to be spiderman , but you know what I mean .

We did go out, she had/has experiences on a fairly similar level to her peers, but we were predominantly at home. Now that she’s 13 she manages her own social calendar 99% of the time and she still prefers being at home.

Eh? 5 hours of clubs a week is less than an hour a day! Are you saying that people whose kids go to after school club until 5pm while they work may as well send them to boarding school?

I could quite happily stay inside!

I don’t because I feel like a bad parent but all they do is moan and argue and want me to buy things. I feel like every outing costs more than the one before!

@MrsSunshine2bThat’s ridiculous! If my DD was out of the house that much then I’d fail to see the difference between that and boarding school tbh. You barely see your child!

indeed - “depression can be helped by getting outdoors”, well yes it can but sometimes it feels unbelievably hard to get your children dressed and ready and out of the house and supervise them on the playground and deal with them nagging for an ice cream you can’t afford.

I had chronic fatigue and mentally I would feel better for getting everyone out and I knew the DC needed it but then I would be flat wiped out for the rest of the day from a 1 hour trip to the park.

This would also highly depend on how much child free time you get. If you have a good support network/kids are at school then you’ll have more energy to take them out on weekends/during holidays.

If however, you are single parent or don’t have any family nearby and the kids are not of school age, then it can be incredibly hard, when literally never having a break from them. The last thing you feel like is taking them out every day and facing toddler tantrums in public, knowing you do this 7 days a week and never have an opportunity to recharge.

I agree with you based on my first scenario but if somebody’s situation is more like the second, then I wouldn’t blame them whatsoever.

I have a small paved garden so we go out a lot to the local park. Maybe if I had a big nice garden we wouldn’t go out as much. I go crazy in the house though if I’m there too long!

Many families simply cannot afford activities during the school holidays! And you don't know people's reasons for not going park and doing free stuff, many people suffer with anxiety and depression. Very rude statement to make really!

Omg

why are people so invested in all the excuses to not take your kids out !!

popping out to have a change of scenery, a bit of daylight. A bit of movement is better than nothing !!

it doesn’t have to be a full on day out that’s Instagram worthy 😂😂

Over scheduling even if the kids actively want to do the activities, ask to go and would be upset to quit any?
People seem happy to accept that some kids don’t like organised activities and would rather be at home, but not that some kids thrive on organised activities and choose to do them. My parenting has always been child led, based on their personalities. The one who wants to try every activity going? Great, I’ll facilitate that as far as I’m able. The one (autistic) who hates activities and people and prefers to be at home? Well I’ll do my best to facilitate that too. All have to compromise to some extent, as I have 3 children and have to balance their needs.

Don’t understand this response. I too am recovering from
cancer treatment but I know this isn’t aimed at me.

My DS isn’t interested in roaming around outside so we rarely do days out. He spends hours playing music (guitars and keyboards) and I think that’s fair enough. It’s the summer holidays after all.

I get what you’re saying and I can’t think of anything worse than being stuck at home for 6 whole weeks with my kids, I need to get out or I start to go insane. BUT, back in the early 90s when I was a kid we spent pretty much the whole summer at home, playing with kids from the street, playing in the garden, going in and out of each others kids, going back out in our jammies after bath time to play one last game of hide and seek. My parents weren’t neglectful or living in poverty they were great! Big days out just weren’t a thing then (in my experience and those of my friends and DH, we have discussed this!) soft plays were a few times a year usually for someone’s birthday, other than that we played in our street and at home. I do wonder if kids these days are too used to being actively entertained that they struggle to make their own fun!

I met a little boy Friday who said he'd just "chilled out" and played his tablet all summer and it made me so sad.

i asked my goddaughter who’s 7 what she’d been up too this summer so far. “Nothing! We played Roblox everyday!” And her sister chimed in with “we’ve been relaxing at home all day”

They were on their way home from the zoo. They’ve already had a week in Portugal. I’ve seen pictures from the park, friends houses and their cousins birthday.

Kids are often full of shit.

People have entirely different perspectives on different activities and their value.

We have a very un-fancy playground around the corner from our house. Equipment has clearly seen better days but there is a good selection of traditional stuff, plus some rocks, bushes and a wooden climbing-area with logs and stuff. Nothing looks innovative, new or shiny, but somehow it just works for us.

My kids have spent many hours of their lives there - probably on average 3-4 hours a week, more during the holidays. It's our "token" trip out on lazy days, plus our go-to afterschool activity. Every time we go there, the kids use the equipment in a different way - different patterns on the monkey-bars, building a course amongst the rocks and stones for the remote-controlled car, trying to swing so high that they can hit the tree branches with their feet, chalking on the ground.

I have seen my kids grow and develop in that playground. It is one of our happy places. We can all be whinging and grumbling at home, but we go through those gates, and suddenly everyone can run, climb, relax and breathe.

One of my son's classmates lives a couple of streets away from us. I was chatting to his mum and asked if they ever hung out at "our" playground.

She said no, it's a bit boring, isn't it? Hopefully the council will find the money to replace it with something a bit better and more up-to-date at some point.

They're the sort of family who do at least two museums, a theme park and an NT property every week of the holiday.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it brought home to me how some families have entirely different outlooks and priorities from ours.

Lower income - could be lack of education, wouldn’t occur to them to do anything other than obvious things like park, theme park or other fancy day out - they wouldn’t think to go for a nature walk, local community event. Poor mental health. Can’t be bothered, easier for children to go on screens, parents on phones. It annoys me how much parents go on phones instead of engaging with their children.

What I find is very typical is all of these families who take their children to expensive activity after expensive activity, chatting away on their phones, no engagement but they can put it on social media and it looks good so oh well!

I teach reception age and the children that struggle with behaviour are often entitled children, used to getting whatever they want, never hearing no or needing to entertain themselves.

To be fair, I had(and still have) a kid that was happy to be at home , perfectly happy to entertain herself for ages and also perfectly happy to hang out/do stuff with me. I remember once she spent a whole hour cutting the grass with scissors(under supervision ),thinking it was the best thing ever! I suppose it’s hard to imagine if you have the complete opposite

I actually think this hits the nail on the head. I don’t think parents that stay home all day are lazy. And I don’t think parents who get out a lot are failing to let their kids be bored. I think everyone is just doing the best they can and adapting their parenting to what suits their kids. My 2 have needed to be actively taught how to play at home with toys independently (and we are beginning to see progress with the 5 year old). They have also always been outdoor cats, since babies really. While the garden will hold them for a bit they are happiest in nature and actually play independently beautifully outside. I think kids are just different and parents do what suits their kids best 👍

We will probably have packed in more experiences over the course of this six week holiday than I think I had across my entire childhood (and I was hardly a deprived child).

But I have had times where my physical and mental health have been shot and psyching myself up to take them to the park at the end of the road felt totally overwhelming.

If you can’t imagine why it’s hard for some people then perhaps you need to use more imagination.