The Power of doing nothing (for children and for us)

This year, newspapers used the phrase “kid rotting” to describe families letting their children spend the holidays simply resting, playing, and daydreaming at home. For once, the message was surprisingly positive and spoke of an invitation to slow down, to stop overscheduling, and to give kids time to do “nothing.” I love that people are starting to celebrate this but the term itself, rotting, still fascinates me. Why label rest in such a negative way?

What does that reveal about how uncomfortable we’ve become with stillness?

The contrast with the school system couldn’t be sharper. Every summer you hear warnings about the so-called “summer slide” and the fear that children will forget everything they’ve learned if they’re not kept constantly busy. But if a few weeks away from it makes them forget, maybe it was never real learning in the first place.

Children don’t rot when they rest.

They recover.

They think.

They grow in the quiet spaces we keep trying to fill.

The discomfort isn’t theirs. Its ours.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that motion equals worth.

We praise the child who’s constantly occupied, the adult who’s endlessly productive.

We fill every spare minute because the silence of unscheduled time makes us uneasy.

The word rotting says more about the adults than the children.

The fear isn’t that kids will fall behind. It’s that we’ll have to sit with our own restlessness.

I remember being bored in the long summer holidays of my childhood. Whole afternoons stretched out with nothing to do. One summer, a friend and I designed our own board game and spent weeks perfecting it, then taught all the children on our street how to play. We were so proud of what we’d made. That boredom was the spark that led to creativity, not the enemy of it.

Now we fill the silence with screens and schedules.

We give our children constant stimulation and call it enrichment.

But rest is the compost of imagination. It’s the space where curiosity takes root.

In home education, this truth becomes impossible to ignore. There will be days when your child seems to be doing nothing. That can be deeply triggering for parents, especially if you’ve grown up equating busyness with value. I remember those early years of home education and how uncomfortable I felt watching my children simply be. I would ask, “What are you doing?” as though learning only counted if it looked productive.

But learning doesn’t always look like doing. Sometimes it looks like staring out of a window, humming a tune, or rearranging Lego bricks for the tenth time. You have no idea what a child is absorbing in those moments. You are not the only authority on what counts as valuable learning.

Rest isn’t laziness. It’s the pause that lets insight catch up.

And it matters for adults too.

We tell ourselves we’re too busy to stop.

Too busy to think.

Too busy to ask whether the things filling our calendars are actually bringing us joy or leading us anywhere we want to go.

Busyness feels safe. It distracts us from the discomfort of not knowing what we need. But when we finally stop, even briefly, the truth starts to speak.

At first, you might not like what you hear.

The frustration.

The resentment.

The whisper of I want more than this.

But those feelings aren’t the problem. They’re the guideposts.

Instead of pushing them away, listen.“I never get any time to myself” becomes “I want more time to myself.”

Then ask the deeper question: What would I love that time to be for?

Rest is where those questions surface, the ones that reveal what you really need in order to thrive. That isn’t selfishness. It’s self-awareness.

We can’t be on all the time. We’re not meant to be.

Rest isn’t rot. It’s renewal. It’s where thinking happens, ideas form, and identity rebuilds itself quietly under the surface.

What if we stopped fearing stillness and started seeing it for what it really is, the space where life expands?