White Space

I posted an article about the benefits of allowing kids to be bored from time to time. (You've seen my page, right? I'm posting all the interesting articles I find but don't have time to blog about.)

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The academic, who has previously studied the impact of television and videos on children's writing, said: "When children have nothing to do now, they immediately switch on the TV, the computer, the phone or some kind of screen. The time they spend on these things has increased.

"But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them."

It is this sort of thing that stimulates the imagination, she said, while the screen "tends to short circuit that process and the development of creative capacity".

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I loved the comment that Wendy made:

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"White space is not your enemy."

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Photo credit.

White space, or negative space, is an art concept. It's the empty, quiet area in artwork, and often adds impact. I ran into it in high school when I was working through the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. They had some of these cool vase-face things.
The vase is the "positive" space, the profiles in the black and white picture highlight the white or negative space. If you look closely you can see them on the sides, mirroring each other. I used to draw the vase-faces as doodles on my school work pretty regularly, and there's a section of my sketch book that has quite a few of these. In art, leaving "white space" can increase the impact of what you do, which is the effect I was going for in this scrapbook page I did a while back:

Wendy made white space into an extremely effective metaphor for life. Structured activities are wonderful. Structure gives organization to our days, and that is something that children thrive on. They like routine. I like routine. I'm most productive on days when our routine is functioning well. But, like the piece of art that has too much in it, a life filled too full looses focus and effectiveness. Children need white space, where they have to invent their own games. Adults need white space as well. It is in the white space of our lives that we ponder, and probe the profound. It is in the white space, and the things we choose to do when we don't have to do anything at all that we discover what is truly important to us.

You can learn a lot about yourself in your white space. But, if life is so scheduled and hectic that there isn't any there, then what are we denying our children? From the article:

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"But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them."

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Don't fear the white space.