1 / 7 Teach Kids to Daydream Mental downtime makes people more creative and less anxious. JESSICA LAHEYOCT 16 2013, 12:36 PM ET George Vnoucek/Flickr Todays children are exhausted, and not just because one in three kids is not getting sufficient sleep. Sleep deprivation in kids (who require at least nine hours a night, depending on age) has been found to significantly decrease academic achievement, lower standardized achievement and intelligence test scores, stunt physical growth, encourage drug and alcohol use, heighten moodiness and irritability, exacerbate symptoms of ADD, and dramatically increase the likelihood of car accidents among teens. While the argument for protecting our childrens sleep time is compelling, there is another kind of rest that is equally underestimated and equally beneficial to our childrens academic, emotional, and creative lives: daydreaming. Ive been reading about daydreaming extensively lately, and it has caused me regret every time I roused one of my students out of their reverie so they would start working on something “more productive.” Daydreaming has been found to be anything but counter-productive. It may just be the hidden wellspring of creativity and learning in the guise of idleness. 2 / 7 Not all mental downtime is alike, of course. Downtime spent playing a video game or zoning out with a television show may have its charms, but the kind of downtime I am talking about is different. Im talking about the kind of mind-wandering that happens when the brain is free of interruption and allowed to unhook from the runaway train of the worries of the day. When the mind wanders freely between random thoughts and memories that float through our consciousness, unbidden. Television, videogames, and other electronic distractions prevent this kind of mental wandering because they interrupt the flow of thoughts and memories that cement the foundation of positive, productive daydreaming. Legendary cognitive psychologist Jerome L. Singer goes so far as to call daydreaming our default mental state. Singer proposed in his 1966 book,Daydreaming: an Introduction to the Experimental Study of Inner Experience, that we have two mental networks, working memory and daydreaming. The two cannot operate at the same time, so when we engage our working memory network, we shut off our daydreaming network. The two forms of thinking may be different, and mutually exclusive, but they are both necessary to our emotional and intellectual health. Scott Barry Kaufman, cognitive psychologist and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, argues that while this dreamy, reflective state might look like idleness to an outside observer, daydreaming kids are at work. “Ode to Positive Constructive Daydreaming”an article Kaufman cowrote with Rebecca McMillanreads: There is, however, another way of looking at mind wandering, a personal perspective, if you will. For the individual, mind wandering offers the possibility of very real, personal reward, some immediate, some more distant. These rewards include self- awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion. 3 / 7 In other words, daydreaming only appears lazy from the outside, but viewed from the insideor from the perspective of a psychologist, such as Kaufman, or a neuroscientist, such as Mary Helen Immordino-Yanga complicated and extremely productive neurological process is taking place. Viewed from the inside, our children are exploring the only space where they truly have autonomy: their own minds. Immordino-Yangs work on the virtue of mental downtime includes the paper “Rest is not Idleness: Implications of the Brains Default Mode for Human Development and Education.” The title quotes a 19th-century British banker named John Lubbock, who wrote, “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summers day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” Lubbock, according to Immordino-Yang, was way ahead of his time in understanding the value of idleness to our essential neurological functioning. What Lubbock called rest, Immordino-Yang calls “constructive internal reflection,” and she considers it is vital to learning and emotional well-being: Inadequate opportunity for children to play and for adolescents to quietly reflect and to daydream may have negative consequencesboth for social- emotional well-being and for their ability to attend well to tasks. One aspect of Immordino-Yangs paper is particularly relevant in todays educational climate. She describes a study that shows mental downtime c