One day after school when I was seven, I snuck the largest umbrella I could find out of our house and walked down to the beach. It was very windy. The tide was out, exposing the long stretch of wet, unruffled sand so characteristic of Crescent Beach. Beyond the tidal flat though, whitecaps chopped up the ocean farther out. I leant into the wind. It was strong enough to stop me from toppling over. Excellent! It seemed perfect for my plans. I climbed up onto one of the wooden pillars that stuck up out of the sand (at the time I didn’t question why they were there…they were just a normal part of the landscape. In hindsight, I suspect they were part of a groyne to prevent erosion). Strong gusts of wind threatened to topple me over while I wrestled with the umbrella. Finally, I got it open and immediately felt the wind tug at it. Another promising sign. Heart pounding, wind rushing in my ears, I closed my eyes, counted to three and jumped.

And landed in a heap on the sand, of course.

I’d really thought I might fly. I’d never seen Mary Poppins (no DVDs in those days) but I was familiar with her iconic flying umbrella. It’s not that I thought I’d conjure magic exactly (although I might have hoped). Rather that I thought a skinny kid, a wide umbrella and a big wind might add up to success.

This story came to mind as I was reading Madeline Levine’s fascinating new book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. I’d picked it up on the strength of a New York Times book review. Judith Warner’s insightful review described it thus:

“Levine’s latest book is a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures — parents’ deep and true love and concern for their kids — and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences, all of which she sees played out, day after day, in her private psychology practice in affluent Marin County, Calif. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges, and with parents who can’t steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. “Our current version of success is a failure,” she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.”

Levine makes the case that we need to reframe success so that it’s less about impressive scores on standardized tests and more about developing character, integrity, problem-solving skills, empathy and kindness. Children equipped with these qualities, Levine argues, will have the real tools they need for engaged adult lives.

Levine’s perspective, developed (as Judith Warner points out) through her clinical and maternal experience, is an expression of our collective need to reinvent the good life. We’ll probably always strive for an ideal, but the character of that striving will be very different if we’re focusing on “connection and contentment” rather than material success.

But what’s so provocative about Levine’s book is the urgency of the task. Lest we think this is a purely philosophical quest, Levine provides case stories and statistics demonstrating the ways in which children’s lives have changed appreciably in the last couple of decades, and the impact this is having on them. For example, Levine reports that “…over the last twenty years, kids have lost close to two hours of play every day, most of that unstructured play.” That playtime has been replaced by extracurricular activities, tutoring, additional homework and screen time. Or it’s getting interfered with by anxious parents who fret about the harm children might come to if they’re not kept under constant supervision. And the impact, in Levine’s experience, is stressed out, exhausted, and perhaps worst of all, disenchanted kids.

Happily, Levine provides some practical strategies for creating alternatives. One of these (one dear to my own heart) is to ensure that children have more time to play and reflect. She suggests five simple things to foster play:

1) Unplug their gazillions of devices

2) Encourage them to play outside

3) Avoid so-called “educational” toys

4) Don’t over-program them

5) Role-model the importance of play by playing ourselves (which has the added bonus of being good for us too)

Levine closes the book with the reminder that the “very things that promote your child’s well-being and happiness are the same things that will promote his or her success in the world.” It will take “courage” to change the status quo, she acknowledges, but not do so is “inexcusable”.

If I were eight-years-old now, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t make it out to the beach with that umbrella. I’d be at judo or playing Angry Birds or studying. Or perhaps an anxious caregiver would stop me from heading out the door, even if I’d been so inclined. What would the cost of that missed experience be? Perhaps nothing, or at least, only a girl’s memory of a beach, a windy day and a bit of folly. But maybe that day, and all the crazy adventures like it, taught me subtle things I’ll never be able to put my finger on. And maybe by not studying or earnestly developing myself or “killing” time, I also learned something about the value of time, enquiry and experience. Something about the good life. And something about, simply, being.

It’s a reasonable thing to shudder when one hears folk songs encouraging us to learn from children. My children do things like giving themselves rug burns sliding down the stairs on their stomachs and trying to stick their fingers up my nose: not behaviour I’m keen on emulating. Nonetheless, when I was at the playground with my children last weekend, I couldn’t help noticing that all the children are seemed to be having a terrific time, while most of the adults sat huddled over their take-out coffee like disengaged lumps. Hmm. If you’ve read the great book Influencer, you will have heard the value of looking for positive deviance, that is, studying the behaviours of those who seem to have managed to solve a problem that the rest of us are grappling with. If we can nail what these successful people are doing that we’re not, then we can mimic that specific behaviour and hopefully solve the problem for ourselves too. I don’t particularly romanticize childhood, but I think it’s reasonable to say that most kids are exquisitely alive, with enviable amounts of curiosity, energy and creativity. Therefore, I sat down and came up with an ad hoc list of where we adults tend to go wrong, and where children’s positive deviances (deviations?) could set us on a different, more switched-on, path:

Adults confuse pleasure with fun. Pleasure’s lovely (you’re not going to hear me disparage the pleasures of a hot bath or a Barolo), and children surely like it too (look at the rapture of a child eating a Häagn-Dazs bar), but fun both demands and gives more to us. Children are more willing to commit to fun: they’ll plan it, anticipate it, invent it…in an odd sort of way they work at it. I think we can learn from their commitment.
Adults focus more on other peoples’ fun. This seems to be an odd, and historically quite new, phenomenon. The psychoanalyst and writer Martha Wolfenstein proclaimed the rise of a “fun morality” as early as the 1950s: one of its features, she said, was that parents were supposed to make things fun for their children, and to demonstrate at every possible turn that life was enjoyable. I think it’s actually pretty nice to foster fun for other people, but we have to find our own too. If you’ve ever watched children negotiate the rules of an invented or make-believe game, you’ll notice that they’re skilled at figuring out what will work for everyone (probably because if not, tantrums ensue). This seems to be a pretty smart strategy, certainly a lot better than perpetual self-sacrifice.
Adults stop moving. Humans are meant to move, something we know from pretty much every scientific study ever conducted on the subject and from the feeling of well-being that it generates in our own bodies. But there’s no doubt that adults just don’t move that much. Children are a marvel to watch: they move constantly.
Adults become suspicious of fun. Too many adults view fun as something that’s going to distract them from more noble pursuits, like work or any one of the gazillions of ways we strive for self-improvement. Unless we adults mess up our kids, children don’t strive for self-improvement per se, they just trust they’ll learn as they grow. This means they take fun at face-value, and enthusiastically embrace it.
Adults eat the apple of self-consciousness. Switching-on and having fun takes risks…we have to move out of our comfort zones and this means that we might look silly, or God forbid, incompetent. Some children do fret about this, but most plunge into things with little worry about how things will “look”. This gives them an enormous freedom to experiment and just be.
Adults think we need to have things to have fun. OK, in our materialistic world, so do a shocking number of children, but they’re likelier to get over it faster. It’s like the old line, “I gave my kid a $150 mega-present and all she wanted to do is play with the box.” Children have an extraordinary capacity to invent and create with what they’ve got: they don’t sit around constructing barriers between themselves and fun by saying, “Well, if I could afford skis and a chalet, I’d have a lot of fun skiing,” or “If I had a sports car, I’d have a blast.” Not a bit of it. They figure out how to have fun with what they’ve got because they have to.
Adults perceive ourselves to be too busy to have fun. Sorry, but I think this time is another false barrier to fun and switching-on, and this comes from someone who gets what seventy hour workweeks are like. Children definitely get more discreet playtime than we do, but the positive deviance isn’t in those divinely long stretches where they’re engaged in involved play: it’s in the way that they find mini-pockets of fun or play throughout the day. Kids can play getting ready to get out the door, putting their clothes away and brushing their teeth. Of course, this is exactly the behaviour that drives many a well-meaning parent crazy, but the truth is that we could learn from their example. Confession: I’m terrible at this. It doesn’t come naturally to me at all, as much because I don’t feel I have the “bandwidth” as much as the time. And yet, that times that I’ve seized moments in the midst of routine have not only created uplifting joy – they’ve provided lasting memories. For example, one of my favourite memories from when Mira was small is when – for some reason I now don’t recall – I decided I had to introduce her to Split Enz at 7:45 on a Thursday morning. She and I danced to I See Red and Six Months in a Leaky Boat, among other terrific songs, until we were breathless. She had no idea why we’d varied our routine, and truth to tell, neither had I. But those fifteen minutes of fun were exquisite and memorable.
We don’t explore enough. Most adults like capital “E” exploring, like visiting new cities or checking out open houses and such, but we’re not so great at small “e” exploring, such as looking for interesting things in our own backyards, neighbourhoods and other familiar spots like local libraries. Unless we’re committed fantasy readers, we also don’t really think about exploring different “realms”, from Middle Earth to ancient Greece to Hogwarts. But children love exploring both intimately familiar and wildly imaginative new realms, and watching them, one sees how it fires their imagination.
We don’t play enough. Kids are great at play: adults are frankly terrible at it. But organizations like the National Institute for Play, the Institute of Play and The Strong Institute for the study and exploration of play are doing cutting-edge research and on-the-ground work that indicates that adults need play just as much as children do, and for all the same reasons: it facilitates learning and creativity; it literally seems to keep the brain flexible and adaptive; it helps to build social bonds and so on. Play is also (usually) a big source of fun.
We don’t go outside enough. Children are naturally drawn to being outside, and most schools or parents still make children go outside every day, or at least close to it. Barring the occasional tears when it’s just too hot/cold/waspy, children inevitably come in with shining eyes, flushed cheeks and a happier, more focused energy. Adults, on the other hand, can easily have whole weeks when we’re only outside walking from house to car. That’s pretty say. Go outside: switch-on.