Three Ways to Prioritize Play and Rest
Establish “boredom time” in your weekly rhythm. Build unstructured time into your family schedule with the same intentionality you’d plan important appointments. This might mean leaving Saturday mornings completely open, creating a daily “do nothing” hour, or protecting the time between school and dinner from scheduled activities. When your young person complains they’re bored, resist the urge to offer solutions or entertainment. Boredom is the birthplace of imagination, original thinking, and self-directed discovery. Your job is simply to hold space for it and trust that something meaningful will emerge from the apparent emptiness.
Practice “free play” to understand what your child really needs. Observe your child during their freely chosen play and notice what themes, skills, or emotional needs they’re working through. Are they repeatedly creating elaborate scenarios where they’re the hero? They might need more opportunities to feel capable and powerful. Do they gravitate toward building and destroying? Perhaps they’re processing change or exploring cause and effect. Instead of interrupting or redirecting their play, let it inform you about their inner world and developmental needs. Then protect and expand opportunities for the kinds of play that seem more compelling to them.
Model rest as valuable, not lazy. Children learn as much from what they observe as from what we tell them. Let them see you choosing rest, reading for pleasure, taking walks without podcasts, sitting quietly without screens, or simply pausing to watch clouds move across the sky. Narrate your choices: “I’m feeling overwhelmed, so I’m going to take ten minutes to just breathe and reset.” or “I had so many ideas today that my brain needed some quiet time to sort them out.” This offers them tangible ways to understand that rest is an active choice made whenever needed, not only as something that happens when everything else is completed.
When we protect time for play and rest, we show our children that their humanity matters more than their productivity. They begin to learn to trust their own rhythms, to find renewal in stillness, and to see imagination as valuable as information. Young people experiencing rest and play in this way grow into adults who can think creatively under pressure, who know how to recharge when depleted, and who understand that some of life’s most important insights come from simply being present to their own experience. Play and rest are not luxuries, they’re the very conditions that cultivate the flexibility and creativity our young people need to thrive.
And if you haven’t yet joined the Mosaic Community, we invite you to do so now. There is a place for you who want to embrace independent meaningful learning at home while your young people are in conventional school settings.
