Slow Parenting: What It Actually Is, and Why It Isn’t a Style

Slow parenting is not a style, and the first thing to do with the phrase is stop treating it like one.

A style is something you pick. Slow parenting is closer to a correction: you look at your family’s week, notice that nobody in the house chose it, and start taking things out until the days have room in them again. Most families never decided on their pace. It accumulated, one reasonable yes at a time, until the calendar was running the children instead of the other way around.

What is slow parenting?

The phrase comes from Carl Honoré, the Canadian journalist who wrote In Praise of Slowness and then, in 2008, Under Pressure, a book about what he called hyper-parenting: the over-scheduled, over-managed, achievement-tracked childhood that had become the middle-class default, and the toll it was taking on children and on parents. Slow parenting, as he described it and as the movement that grew up around it uses the term, means fewer scheduled activities and more unstructured time; letting children play, explore and be bored instead of being enriched; stepping back from managing every outcome; and measuring a childhood by its quality rather than its output.

It is not permissive parenting, which is the confusion that comes up most. Slow parenting has plenty of boundaries; what it lacks is a schedule. The child who is allowed a whole empty afternoon in the yard is also the child who is expected to come in when called and to entertain herself without a screen. Slow is about pace, not rules.

Why the pace matters (the research, briefly)

The mechanism is simple and well supported. In 2014 Jane Barker’s team at the University of Colorado sorted the weeks of seventy six-year-olds into structured time (lessons, practices, organized activities, anything adult-run) and less-structured time (free play, outings, hanging around) and found that the more unstructured a child’s week, the better she was at self-directed executive function, which is the ability to decide what to do and do it without being told. The kids with the most scheduled weeks were the worst at it. A fast childhood is one in which an adult has already decided what happens next, all day, and a child in that childhood never gets to practice deciding.

The case for slow isn’t sentimental. A slower week is not a gentler version of the same childhood. It’s a childhood in which the child does more of the living.

What I watched arrive

I taught the teenagers a fast childhood produces, for eleven years. They arrived at fourteen unable to fill an unstructured minute, because they had never had one. Every hour of their lives had been scheduled, delivered and supervised, first by school and then by the activities that filled the hours after school, and when I handed them an open stretch of time they experienced it as a problem to be solved by an adult, or by a phone. They were exactly as capable of self-direction as their childhoods had allowed them to become, which was not very, and it wasn’t their fault.

The moment I knew I was leaving wasn’t about pace, exactly, but it was about the same thing. My oldest was about to turn six and headed for kindergarten, and I was told that because he was several grade levels ahead in math, his enrichment would be delivered on an iPad. A five-year-old, on a tablet, as the reward for being ahead. There was no way on this earth I was going to let that happen, and sitting with that, I realized something else: in all my years of teaching, there were only a handful of students I had looked at and thought, I hope my kid turns out like that one. A handful. The rest were apathetic about learning, had no passions they could name, and when I asked what they wanted to be, said TikToker or YouTuber. They didn’t know what they were good at or what they cared about, because the system had never left them a minute to find out. A fast childhood produces exactly that, and I had watched it for eleven years before it came for my own kid.

Where the pace comes from (it isn’t you)

Nobody sets out to overschedule a six-year-old. It happens because every individual yes is reasonable. The soccer is good for her. The music lessons are a gift. The enrichment class is what everyone does. Two working parents need the afternoon covered and an activity covers it. School assigns homework, and the homework takes the hour that was left. And underneath all of it is a quiet, expensive industry that profits from your fear that an unfilled hour is a wasted one, and a culture that reads a full calendar as a sign of a good parent. Slow parenting is unpopular with that industry for the same reason a paid-off car is unpopular with the dealership.

So the blame doesn’t land on you. It lands on a design that made the fast childhood the default and made every parent who wants out feel like she’s depriving her kid. She isn’t. She’s giving the kid back the hours.

What slow looks like in a house

In ours it looks like a rule and a yard. My kids are bored all the time; every single day one of them tells me so, and my answer is the same every time: that’s great, your boredom is not my problem, you can find something to do or I will happily find something for you to do, and there’s always schoolwork and chores. They know a screen is not the answer, and they know why, because we’ve talked about what it does to a developing brain, about dopamine, about why boredom is where creativity comes from. So they go find something. The boundary has never moved, and that is the whole reason it works. My kids read for hours a day because there are hours. They climb trees, roll down hills and run a mud kitchen because nobody has scheduled the afternoon they’d need to do it in. None of that is an activity. It’s what children do with time when they’re given it, and the giving is the entire method. Slow parenting, in practice, is mostly the discipline of not signing up.

How to slow down, if you’re in the fast version now

Start with the calendar, not the philosophy. Print the week and count the hours your kid spends in something an adult organized, including school and homework. Then count the hours that are hers. For most school-age kids the second number is shockingly small, and seeing it is what changes things.

Then take one thing out. Not everything; one activity, the one she cares least about. Don’t replace it. The empty slot is the point, and the first two weeks of it will be uncomfortable for both of you, because she’ll be bored and you’ll feel like you’ve failed her. I’ve written about what to do with the boredom here and about why a kid who can’t fill an hour isn’t broken here. Hold the slot open for a month before you judge it.

Protect one stretch a day that nobody schedules: the hour after school, a slow morning on the weekend, an evening with nothing planned. Defend it the way you’d defend a doctor’s appointment. Then, when it’s held for a while, take out one more thing.

And if you homeschool, the calendar is entirely yours, which is both the gift and the trap, because a homeschool week can fill up with co-ops and classes and curriculum until it’s faster than school ever was. If your days feel like they’re running you, Where Your Day Falls Apart is a free twelve-question look at where the time is going, and it’s the place I’d start.

One thing

This week, write down every scheduled thing your kid does and cross out one. Then leave the space empty and watch what grows in it.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Honoré C, Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (HarperOne, 2008). Link
• Barker JE, Semenov AD, Michaelson L, Provan LS, Snyder HR, Munakata Y, “Less-structured time in children’s daily lives predicts self-directed executive functioning,” Frontiers in Psychology 5:593, 2014. Link