You know what's weird? Parents. Most of us are just trying to do the best we can — which often translates into the "most" we can, as if children in every generation until this one were sadly under-stimulated.

They grew up without tutors! Without travel volleyball! Without educational videos and "movement" classes that start before the kids can actually move! And by golly, very few of them were encouraged to take five different Advanced Placement classes at once!

And it's beginning to look as if they were a lot luckier for it.

It's not that I don't believe in education. We've hired tutors and paid for test prep, and right now we're awaiting word on which high school our elder son gets into. Yes, here in New York you apply to public high schools the way you apply to college. It's brutal.

But what I learned in researching my parenting book, "Free-Range Kids," is that there are some very precious skills to be learned when kids are allowed to be just ... kids. When they have to come up with a way to entertain themselves. When they're playing a game with a friend and have to decide whether the ball was in or out. When they have nothing to do, so they start digging in the dirt or looking harder at a leaf or humming or just daydreaming.

Those may seem like wastes of time, but they are anything but. Kids use their free time to figure out what they're really interested in. From that interest comes an eagerness to learn, even if it's the names of every Super Bowl team since 1985. Free time also gives kids a chance to do things on their own, which leads to confidence, which sure beats another trophy when it comes to fostering leadership. Kids who are told what to do all the time — by teachers, tutors, coaches — don't get a chance to develop the inner direction we so admire in entrepreneurs and politicians (the good ones, anyway).

Think of the difference between a child who discovers he just loves spiders and spends afternoons watching them or maybe making spider videos and a kid stuck in extra credit biology tutorial three afternoons a week. Which one do you think is going to grow up the impassioned scientist? Or filmmaker, for that matter? Or the world's first chef to serve a five-star fly?

Or maybe he'll grow tired of spiders and, after dissecting a few, move on to dissecting his iPhone. It all depends on whether he — or she — has any free time to meander from this to that.

Sure it makes sense to enrich our children's lives with some cool classes and trips. Expose them to the world. But remember how interesting the world was to us ? A beach in Bermuda is great, but so is the backyard when you've got a shovel. Childhood comes pre-enriched by the fact that children are born curious and will seek out the things that are wondrous to them. Directing them toward this or that — art or soccer — is part of our job. But the other part is letting them find their own direction so they don't need a GPS to find their own hearts.

I can't say my kids are turning out perfectly or have found their ultimate passion yet. So far, they seem to love heavy metal, math and football. (Off the record: Yawn times three!) But I am trying to hover a little less and let them mosey a little more. Einstein, Napoleon, Madame Curie, George Clooney — I'm pretty sure none of them had after-school Mandarin lessons five days a week, with calculus and violin on Saturdays, and they managed to make something of their lives.

So to all the folks groping their way along the parenting journey: Here's hoping your kids lead you on part of it.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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