Teach Kids To Daydream Analysis

Most kids hear it in school: “Stop daydreaming and pay attention,”. Who ever said that daydreaming is bad? In the article, ‘Teach Kids to Daydream’, author Jessica Lahey argues how positive daydreaming can be for children in schools. This article was published in the Atlantic on October 16th, 2013. The article starts out with the quote, “Today’s children are exhausted, and not just because one in three kids is not getting sufficient sleep,” which makes it clear from the beginning where the author’s attitude is going. Then she goes on to explain the dangers of sleep deprivation until she inevitably moves on to a different subject, the actual main point of the article, daydreaming. She defines daydreaming as, “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.”, and ‘mental downtime’. Bringing in her research, she points at many scientists and researchers who agree with this. Such as ‘legendary’ cognitive psychologist, Jerome L. Singer, who wrote a book in 1966 called: Daydreaming: an Introduction to the Experimental Study of Inner Experience. There is a lot of good content in Lahey’s article about how kids
The ‘walk around with you hand in your pockets, soaking in the sun, planning in your head and organizing your mind’ type. Which, Jerome L. Singer talks about in his book, and called ‘positive constructive daydreaming’. Although it seems that was all Lahey needed, for if she had read a bit more, she would have run into the trouble of problematic daydreaming. For Singer also identifies two other types of daydreaming, guilty-dysphoric daydreaming and poor attention control. Both these are symptoms of anxiety and depression, which also is contrary to Lahey’s conclusion that daydreaming alleviates anxiety as she claims in the last part of her subhead, “mental downtime makes people more creative and less