A common challenge people with teenagers face
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Hey, Reader I was in Switzerland last week. Visiting family, old friends, places I know well. At some point I sat with a group of parents of teenagers. Good, responsible people. Caring people. People who clearly love their kids. The conversation was more like a logistics report. Think: Maersk or Lufthansa transport entities... The questions:
Every hour of every week, planned. Every gap, filled. Sounds familiar? How most people try to fix itThe logic seems solid: a busy kid is a happy kid. An engaged kid is a safe kid. An occupied kid doesn't fall into the wrong crowd, doesn't get strange ideas, doesn't spiral into screens. So parents do what caring parents do. They organize. They coordinate. They drive. They keep the calendar busier than that of a CEO of an S&P 500 company... So their children's lives don't go empty. And if you're in your late 40s or 50s and your children are between 10 and 16, the stakes feel even higher. You waited. You invested. You are certainly not going to drop the ball now. Why those solutions often fall shortI watched those same parents over several days. All the same. They were exhausted. Not from anything dramatic. From the relentless low-grade effort of keeping everyone everywhere on time. And the teenagers?
They moved through it all like customers at a Marriott's Sunday buffet.
Cherry-picking what they wanted.
Ignoring the rest. Expecting the next option to appear.
One mother told me she hadn't read a book in four months. "I'm just too tired. Too many things to coordinate." Jonathan Haidt documents exactly this in The Anxious Generation (2024). He shows how the play-based childhood began disappearing in the 1980s. How overscheduling has quietly become one of the main ways parents block the very experiences their children need most: risk, uncertainty, boredom, and the chance to figure something out without adult supervision. His research links the collapse of unstructured time directly to the rise of anxiety and depression in adolescents across the Western world... Let that sink in. The calendar was full. Nobody was resting. The kids were constantly stimulated. Nobody was thinking. The family was together at every moment. Nobody was alone long enough to know what they actually felt. What's really going on underneathImagine an Eagle Mama. While she's hunting for food, the kid(s) are simply alone. Sometimes for hours. No wild animal schedules its young into permanent stimulation. Boredom is not a problem to solve. It is a biological state with a function. Neuroscience calls it the Default Mode Network: when the brain is not busy processing external input, it switches into a mode of reflection, imagination, and self-regulation. This is where identity gets built.
A child who is never bored never activates that network long enough to develop it. And here is the part nobody says out loud: the parents filling those calendars are often doing it as much for themselves as for their children. Yeah, I know - I'm harsh here! But! Watching your child lie on the floor doing absolutely nothing is uncomfortable. It looks like failure. It looks like your job isn't done. Parents who had children later in life often carry an extra weight of this. Less margin for error, they think. More has to go right. So they fill the time. And in doing so, they train their children to expect that all discomfort will be removed before they have to sit with it. A better approachLet the afternoon be empty. At least. One afternoon a week. No plan, no ride, no activity booked. Tell your child: "You have a few hours, figure it out." They will complain. That is fine. Discomfort is not damage. Boredom does not need to be cured. It needs to be tolerated long enough to do its work. What grows in that space, over weeks and months, is something no club or coach can install: the ability to generate direction from the inside. Peter Gray, evolutionary psychologist and author of Free to Learn, spent decades studying this.
His conclusion: children who have regular access to unstructured, self-directed time become more emotionally resilient, more socially capable, and better at solving problems as adults.
The skills come from the emptiness, not the schedule.
Concrete, practical stepsBefore you fill the next gap in the calendar, ask yourself three things:
The answers will tell you more than any parenting book... And if your child looks at you like you've lost your mind when you say there's nothing planned for Saturday afternoon: that's not a problem. That's the refreshing beginning. Key takeawaysThe most exhausted parents I know have the fullest calendars. The most capable adults I know had childhoods with long stretches of nothing to do. You do not have to fill every hour to be a good parent. You have to be willing to hand the hour back and trust that something real will grow in it. That is not neglect. That is not laziness. That is how organisms develop. It is how your child builds a self that does not collapse the moment there is no one there to schedule what comes next. They don't need another Tuesday activity. They need a Tuesday with nothing on it. Happy, regenerative Weekend to you! Sources: |
Let's REGENERATE the world - starting with yours 🌱
Swiss-born, living on a homestead in Transylvania for 20 years. Gardener, permaculture designer, regenerative consultant. My own reset started with a heart attack. Eight years later, I'm in better shape than ever. Because I stopped living outside my own nature. I write for people +45 who feel the same drift. Two or three letters a week. No hype. Nature isn't the backdrop here. It's the diagnostic tool.