NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota
State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
August 6, 1998
Kim Bushaw, Parent Line Program Specialist
NDSU Extension Service
A late May Harris Poll survey of 1,007 adults found that reading was the favored leisure activity of 30 percent of the Americans they phoned. Reading was followed by television watching (21 percent), gardening (14 percent) and family time (13 percent). Several other pastimes followed, including fishing, team sports, sewing, exercise, shopping, motorcycling and sleeping.
Before everyone feels shamed into grabbing up their children, a picnic basket and a Frisbee, let's consider how most of these activities can include family members.
Reading can take us places we'll never otherwise visit, put us in someone else's shoes, expand our minds and our vocabularies. Reading can make us better spellers and problem-solvers. So, why not read?
Read your favorites alone to enjoy some quiet time and because it models to children that reading is a fun, relaxing thing to do. They'll notice and copy your reading patterns. The more you read, the better reader you become.
Share reading time with one member of the family at a time. Pick a chapter book together, and commit time that will belong to only the two of you, even if it's 10 minutes in the morning before the baby starts to holler or one chapter every Tuesday evening while the two of you are waiting in the car for older siblings at basketball practice. Time spent reading to a child is never wasted. Be sure to keep your reading date with your kids even after they learn to read by themselves. Positive encouragement goes a lot further than negative nagging in improving skills and engaging cooperation.
Read together as a family. Discuss what you've read. One family with high-school children has their own informal book club. They each read, recommend and discuss. What a safe way for young adults to express their views as they separate from their parents. The parents respond with their feelings based on their values and beliefs too. These exchanges are all done based on characters in a book rather than looking like personal attacks from either side.
Television watching can be used in the same way as book reading when adults choose wisely, limit amounts of time that TV can be used, and watch and discuss programming with their children. The poll noted that the respondents had about 20 hours per week of leisure time. It's frightening to think that anyone would opt to spend much of that in front of the TV.
Gardening, too, can incorporate the whole family's help. Most parents who have success with this are those who let their children start helping from the planning stage. "If the whole garden is filled with food I don't like," reasons the 12-year-old, "why should I water, weed and pick only to show up at the table and be faced with it again? But if I get to plant pumpkins to sell in the fall, I'll help all summer."
And before we put too much stock in these statistics, consider who would be home to answer their phones for such a survey. Probably those who are reading a book or watching television. To date I've seen very few fishermen on the lake, shoppers in the mall or motorcyclists on the highway answering surveys on their cell phones.
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More than 100 Parent Line columns are in the book "Please Tell Me This is Just a Stage." To order, send $9.95 per copy to Distribution Center, Box 5655, NDSU, Fargo, ND 58105-5655.
Kim Bushaw answers the Parent Line, an information and listening support line for North Dakota parents from the NDSU Extension Service. Call the Parent Line at 1-800-258-0808 (231-7923 in Fargo) with questions about this column and other parenting topics. The Parent Line is answered 7:30 a.m. - 9:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 7:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Friday.
Source: Kim Bushaw (701) 231-1070
Editor: Becky Koch (701) 231-7875