Youth should make their own entertainment

Not long ago a very good article about the plight of the growing number of wayward, listless unemployed youth appeared in the Nunatsiaq News. The well-intended article stated that we must find a means to entertain today’s youth. The author may have meant much more than what was written but it is my humble opinion that helping youth learn to entertain themselves would be a far better answer to the problem.

For thousands of years people lived in the north without radios, TVs, computers, walkmans and other electronic gadgetry. They learned to entertain themselves in a wide variety of ways. If they were bored, the chances were that they never expressed these feelings as vocally as we do today.

One of the increasingly popular events in the Arctic Winter Games was spawned from activities designed to stave off boredom. These unique events are now known as Arctic Sports. People also entertained themselves through a wide variety of games (other than Arctic sports) plus singing, drum dancing, producing arts and crafts, story-telling just to mention a very few.

One of Canada’s Governors General, Field Marshal Lord Alexander, once commented that if you are bored then blame yourself. He definitely was not thinking about relieving one’s boredom with inappropriate and negative activities, nor by setting in front of a tube with brain in neutral watching some mindless video. He advocated that we become involved in positive, creative and imaginative activities and projects and not to depend upon the decisions of other people for our entertainment.

In many ways we are losing the art and skills of entertaining ourselves. Parents as well as young people have been caught in the multi-media web. How many times do we find it more expedient and easy to place our child and ourselves in front of a video or TV program instead of finding alternatives? It becomes too easy.

At a workshop held recently in Sydney Cape Breton the class was invited to a Ceilidh. There was a piano player, who knew just about every tune under the sun, three fiddlers, a guitar player and several spooners. After an evening full of foot-stomping music, singing, dancing and home-cooking one of our members from Igloolik (there were 14 of us from Nunavut) addressed the hosts and musicians by stating that he had one of the better times of his life. Here was an example of people providing their own entertainment and enjoying every minute.

I praise the efforts our schools are making to provide extra curricular activities. Those activities will provide a means for our youth to engage in healthy and productive exertion. However maybe we should also be guiding and instructing them in the skills of positive self-entertainment at home and in school from kindergarten to high school.

Frank Pearce
Iqaluit