Some people believe that children’s leisure activities must be educational, otherwise, they are a complete waste of time. Do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your experience.
It is customary for children to do leisure activities of various natures for their smooth development of cognitive abilities and skills. All those activities in which the children get engaged in their free-up space are regarded as leisure activities. These can be some artwork, recreational outdoor trips, online gaming, physical sports activities, or even socializing with family and friends.
Though some people believe that children’s leisure activities must be educational, otherwise, they are a complete waste of time. However, it is not necessary that these activities must be wholly based on educational stuff because these activities are something beyond the learning stress on children and are crucial for stress management, cognitive development, and emotional well-being of children. Also, non-educational leisure activities explore creativity, personal interests, confidence building, and imagination within the children.
To express the importance of non-educational leisure activities some of the arguments are to be mentioned here. Firstly, non-educational leisure activities such as online gaming, biking, hiking, playing a cricket match, and playing hide and seek; all of them enable children to relieve from routine stress of education. It gives them an opportunity to have fun.
Secondly, such non-educational leisure activities also increase the children’s social connectivity and develop communication skills in children. Thirdly, non-educational leisure activities permit children to explore their personal interests, hobbies, and passions in life beyond traditional knowledge of academic subjects. Moreover, these kinds of leisure activities enable children to develop problem-solving skills and critical thinking.
Contrary to this, educational leisure activities are helpful to children in developing their love for education. These can improve the academic knowledge of students such as done by various online educational gaming applications, educational videos, movies, documentaries, and other such activities. Also, children can learn a lot more things during play via leisure activities of educational nature.
To sum up, leisure activities must be part and parcel of children’s life because they are crucial for making them more active, healthy, and vibrant citizens. However, maintaining a balance between educational and non-educational leisure activities would be a far better approach because it would not only enhance the child’s interest in education but would find out the individual qualities within a child as well.
