Post on 22-Apr-2015
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Your Child’s Time Diet
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What’s on your to-do list today? Do you feel like you’re just about drowning in things that just have to be done?
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Do you have a list as long as your arm of things to do? And
are some of the things on that list activities involving
your child?
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A lot of writers have commented on the modern
phenomenon of overscheduled children
.
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An“overscheduled” child is one who has lots of
different enriching activities on.
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Not only does this child go to a Montessori preschool (or some other preschool), but
he or she also goes to swimming lessons, beginner
gym classes and more.
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The options get even wider when the school years kick in,
with out-of-school sporting and cultural possibilities
galore.
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You might ask what on earth has changed since
our childhoods. A lot of us (I do!) remember piano lessons and Girl Guides/Boy Scouts and Saturday sport with a
mid-week practice.
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But today, it’s very easy for parents to try to do
everything to give their children an enriched
experience and allow them to have every single opportunity
possible, and to have something on every single
day of the week – sometimes two things in one day.
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And all these activities, worthwhile as they all are
individually, are having a bad effect on children.
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The main way that it is affecting children is in their
sleeping patterns.
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if a child does a whole lot of activities, he or she is going
to come home in the evening, eat a bit and then tumble into
bed and go straight off to sleep because so much
energy has been used during the day with all those
activities.
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However, while a child might be tired at the end of a busy day with heaps of scheduled
activities, he or she might not be getting the quality sleep
needed for good health.
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All those activities are very stimulating and get a good buzz of excitement going – something that technically could be called stress but doesn’t seem like stress as your child probably does
enjoy gym, music and movement, swimming
lessons, art classes, etc.
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this buzz of excitement does make it harder for your child to relax enough to
get into “delta sleep” – a very deep sleep state where all
the growing and rebuilding of tissues is done.
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According to some experts, this lack of quality sleep may be a contributing
cause of ADHD – it’s as if whizzing around, chopping and changing from this to
that becomes an inbuilt habit.
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So how do we make sure that our kids are not stressed and
overscheduled?
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Know the answer at
Gold Coast Montessori
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www.fridayschildmontessori.com