Carsons vacation fund

Carson Loveless Start Date: Feb 20, 2023 - End Date: Feb 19, 2024
  • Toronto, ON, Canada

My Travel Story

by: Carson Loveless Start Date: Feb 20, 2023 - End Date: Feb 19, 2024
Children in Western societies have less free time to play than they used to. According to Patrice Baldwin, a leading figure in the world of drama in education, “much of children’s after school time is taken up with organized after school clubs and structured activities and homework” (2012, p. 53). As a result, children are less often going outside to play with one another. Their lives are now “highly organized,” causing “spontaneous play and the freedom to play for long periods” to be “lost” (Baldwin, 2012, p. 53). Baldwin notes that, when children do have free time, they “increasingly turn to the digital world” (2012, p. 53). Since Baldwin’s observation in 2012, children’s screen time has increased. Even more recently, a study in Ontario, Canada found that children have been “spending nearly triple the recommended time on screens during the [COVID-19] pandemic,” for an average of nearly “six hours of screen time every day,” with some children spending “up to 13 hours in a single day on screens” (Jones, 2021, paras. 1-2). Children’s free-play time is being consumed by structured, after-school activities and by increased use of screen technology. This is concerning, given that psychologist Peter Gray, among others, has noted “a strong relationship between the decline of play opportunities for children ... over the last half century and an alarming increase in children psychopathology” (Whitebread et al., 2017, p. 5). For children’s healthy development, having unstructured, free time to play is crucial.
One of the structured after-school activities in which children often participate is the one-to-one music lesson. In traditional Western music education, it has been common for music teachers in one-to- one contexts to teach their child students using similar methods applied to the teachers themselves in university, by using formal, structured, and hierarchical approaches. As a result, music teachers may not be teaching children in ways that are sensitive to and encompassing of crucial developmental needs, such as the need for playful activity. While private music teachers may not view such developmental needs as their responsibility, all teachers of children have a special opportunity to attend to children’s needs; in children’s lives, they can be the second most influential adults, after parents (Scott, 2014, p. 91).
  • Toronto, ON, Canada