Hobbies are PROOF POSITIVE

Apparently 80% of current parents grew up with at least one, if not multiple hobbies…

HOWEVER, today only 20% of their kids have a hobby!

Well those were the rough empirical/anecdotal numbers I came across recently. Even if they are slightly exaggerated, they are nonetheless quite shocking if not outright scary.

Why?

Winston Churchill asserted,

To be really happy and really safe, one must have at least two or three hobbies and they all must be real.

And you can easily Google “benefits of hobbies” to find a ton of arguments (e.g. social, emotional, health, etc.) for human beings to spend copious time with model trains, baseball cards, quilting, handcrafts, woodworking,…

So what about those of us who don’t have hobbies, who are too busy, or just never felt the compulsion to dive deep into a pastime?

One of my little hobbies is Googling issues like this. I genuinely enjoy reading the arguments online from people who post questions like, “Why doesn’t my boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife have any hobbies?”

Then they go back and forth – one saying that shopping and Facebook aren’t hobbies….while the others insisting that playing video games and watching sports on TV aren’t hobbies either!

I know people who feel guilty because they simply don’t have any hobbies. And of course I know people who care more about their hobbies than their families (and may even spend gobs of money on their boat, on golf trips, on designer purses,…)

Ok, it’s not really a major hobby of mine to eat popcorn while reading internet flame wars like this…but I do enjoy it here and there. I also find it very instructive.

For the record, my hobbies today are golf, chess, and reading (71 books this year already!). And I have always had intense hobbies throughout my entire my life. So obviously I’m very much in the pro-hobby camp with Sir Winston Churchill.

Let’s get back to our kids…

To me, a child’s hobbies are a great barometer of their overall education and healthy personal development.

Many kids don’t have hobbies simply because they don’t have any free time; their lives are grotesquely over-scheduled. Between organized sports, homework, musical instrument lessons and practice, all-summer-long camps, etc. they don’t have a spare minute to pursue, no less cultivate, their curiosities.

Others do have spare time but squander it on “electronic addictions”.

Of course homeschooled children have the major advantage of significantly more free time and freedom than those in school who are beset by attendance obligations, hidebound curricula, and invasive homework assignments. Sorry, did I repeat myself? Well the downside of school certainly merits constant repetition!

Furthermore, because school is a torturous experience, school children are more prone to “electronic addictions” in their scant free time. They need to decompress and I almost don’t blame them for wanting to veg out.

So, in my experience, homeschooled children generally are way ahead, naturally, on the hobby front. Almost all the homeschooled kids I know have a really cool incipient hobby, if not several.

Although, there are sub-populations within the homeschool community that are a little weak on the hobby front – they would be comprised of those kids who are very recently pulled out of school, those who re-create school at home too much, and those who succumb to said “electronic addictions”.

Like I said above, I really like to use hobbies as a gauge, as a simple measure of how a child is progressing, and hence of the job his or her parents are doing.

Success in life requires hard work. And hard work requires SELF-MOTIVATION. When children (and adults) are delighted by and immersed in what they are doing, they won’t need any incentives, any faint praise, any hired instructors, or any coercion to put the time required for mastery in.

Nobody was giving Bill Gates or Michael Dell assignments to complete for programming or computer assembly (respectively). Nobody was pushing Palmer Lucky (homeschooled kid!) to spend all his time tinkering with virtual reality headsets while he was creating the company that he sold for $2 billion to Facebook.

They were simply diving deep into what started out as mere hobbies.

While we may not be parenting future billionaires, we should still do everything in our power to give our children the space, the time, and the resources for these types of creative outlets. In the long run, it’s probably far more important than grammar, American history, calculus, and whatnot. It’s far more important to connect our children to the passions that will not only wake them up excited and early each morning, but will genuinely give them an endless well of happiness and purpose.

I will close with one more thought I came across recently while indulging my Googling hobby…

Someone, and I can’t remember who, said that whatever it is we do when we “procrastinate” should probably be our primary focus/job in the first place.

So keep your eyes peeled for these little sparks in our kids’ lives and in our own.

Then go and kindle them!

~Dan

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