Different kids are, of course, inclined to different things. Archery and BB guns are often popular with boys.

Lots of kids like nature study if their parents do it with them starting when they're young. Among families I've known, the boys whose dads have introduced them to carpentry, woodworking, handyman work of all sorts have generally enjoyed that. Same with fishing, hunting, etc if their dad is into these. Girls (again, if started into it when young) often enjoy cooking and needlework with their moms.

Around here, lots of families have set up trampolines in the yard.

Our daughter is now grown up and teaching music. She was introduced to storybooks when young, and asked to be helped with learning to read when she was four or five. She also liked outdoors, hiking, nature study, and all that sort of thing. And - again, given her individual nature - really enjoyed drawing, watercolor, and playing music. She went to university and studied philosophy, linguistics, and musical composition. Got out of school and went to Korea to teach English, and taugt ESL when she returned. Since then she's gotten into professional music: teaching, composing, performing.

They can : join 4H, raise pets and farm animals ,fish, grow plants , read books , play chess, work on neighboring farms (or yours) .

On an adjacent homestead, to the south of our own, the family has two girls (about 8 and 13, I believe). They like to read, play music (one on the violin, one on the cello), visit the lambs on the neighborhood sheep ranch, play up in a treehouse, do art projects, go kayaking with their parents, and ice-skate or cross-country ski in winter.

On the homestead downhill and to the east of us, the couple have no children of their own but have horses that they raise and train. Kids of various ages come there to learn to ride ponies and horses.

A broad observation would be that if the parents don't spend undue time in front of the TV or computer screen (games or internet), the kids will have much less tendency to spend undue time that way.

They could learn to type on a type writer, study farming ,Paint, draw, whittle , get boy scout merit badge books from the 1960's and do the agricultural ones ( about 35 then, now 5) .Or join the boy scouts now and do them all. prepare for the future .

Fieldtip arrows for a 7 year old are not expensive ;)

A clubhouse or treehouse and siblings will generate quite a bit of enjoyment.

Me and my siblings were homeschooled. Our family is not exactly a homesteading family anymore, but when I was 10, I believe we qualified.

If they're digging holes just for fun, they obviously aren't working hard enough. At those ages, neither my brother nor I would want to pick up a shovel after putting in a good days work with dad. I'm 18 now, and I appreciate the work ethic they've raised me with. That said, my parents provided me and my siblings with opportunities to pursue many recreational activities include music, hiking and camping, canoeing, skiing, cycling, swimming, and very importantly, reading.

Work with dad consisted of a wide range of trades, including slate roofing as the primary activity (both my brother and I were on the roof by the age of 10), carpentry and woodworking, gardening, painting (house-painting, not art-painting), basic plumbing. Pretty much everything you need to know to do a basic remodeling job. At 18 years old, I'm fully capable of redoing a bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom, or installing one new.

He also trained us both in bicycle maintenance, being an avid cyclist and having worked in bicycle shops for many years in his youth.

While the work kept us busy for much of the time, the time that was left was rarely spent idly looking for entertainment. My father is a writer, with many articles and one book published. He taught me and my brother to write clearly and effectively. As we got older, he taught us history, science, and philosophy. My mother taught us mathematics.

My father also taught us both how to sew. Despite having female connotations, it is a very useful skill that I have already called upon many times in my life.

I say, if your children don't know how to fill their free time, they have too much of it.

For my own children, if they want free time, they will have to convince me of the merits of the activity they intend to fill that time with.

There are not enough hours in a lifetime to spend them idly searching about for entertainment. And if your children enjoy digging holes, there are many plants and fenceposts that require holes dug. Set them somewhere useful. They will appreciate it later in life, when they have a strong work ethic, and are earning twice what their lazy friends can make.

Henry, your childhood experience and upbringing sound very familiar. You sound happy, as well as competent and energetic.

Our daughter also wound up being a real doer.

Thanks for the ideas! My mom just gave us a book she had with color drawings and descriptions of North American Wildlife, including plants, trees, insects, snakes, birds, mammals, and fish! So, now when we see something interesting, we look it up and try to ID it. We unfortunately discovered that all those brambles in the woods are not raspberries, but multiflora roses--darn!

Last week they came out of the woods with part of a deer spine!

They also moved a large stack of 2x4's to the other side of the pole barn and stacked them neatly. They are fairly heavy and long for the little guys, but they didn't complain--they feel like men when they do hard work!

Last weekend we took them fishing and they each caught one!

Henry-You don't sound at all like the teens a teach in a nearby city high school--some of them are so lazy!

My daughter has a pool and a trampoline. She likes to shoot targets and is active in 4h showing animals (chickens and goats). She likes to ride the 4 wheeler, but also like to sew and cook.

Well there are a lot of ideas, but many of the ideas here I would classify as "work", not "fun". My kids loved to split up into teams (depending on how many friends or family played along). One team would go hide somewhere on the property and one would wait with the dog. After a predetermined timeframe the team with the dog would try to track and find the hiders. They had great fun with that. They also got very good at hiding treasurers and drawing up treasure maps. With my help we even charred the edges, etc. of the map to make it look "old". Scavenger hunts were also always fun.

We have always had a campfire ring and making smores is a big memory of their childhood. Another fun thing is our big collection of the Fisher Price "Little People" playsets from the 1970s. They would lug all of that outside. The barn was the funnest. They would take grass clippings and make hay bales and feed the animals. They would make entire cities across the entire yard. They played for hours out there. Of course running through the sprinkler and allowing them a bit of hillside to get all muddy and have a mudslide down there was a delight for them. As the kids grew, they enjoyed the four wheeler. Especially in winter when they attached an overturned vehicle hood and pulled it around the pasture for a sled. I think they particularly liked taking the turns so that everyone fell out. Of course snowball fights and snowforts. Treehouses were popular as was building bridges out of any scrap lumber over anything even remotely resembling a stream (even 12 inches across). They also went through a Star Wars phase where they would take a stick and it would be a Jedi sword. That phase lasted a whole summer. Also taking weeping willow branches and holding them to their backside to pretend they were horses (and one kid was the trainer). They occupied themselves through their entire childhood....

My brother and I built a fort, another fort, and a 2-story fort. Then, we built 3 dog houses for our dogs, a rabbit pen for our 2 rabbits, helped my grandfather remodel his home, and helped him build bee hives. So, we started enjoying building VERY early on. It wasn't something they made us do, just something we loved to do.

We were both homeschooled and only had to do school study for about 4 hours a day. That left plenty of time for other activities. We played forest rangers from the time I was 7 until I was, well probably 16! We loved to listen to Old-time radio, specifically "Ranger Bill" and "The Lone Ranger".

When I was 10, I started farming with my own little flower garden that my granddaddy helped me start. Then, when I was 12 and my brother was 9, we started our first vegetable garden. It was very small in comparison to my granddaddy's farm but it kept us busy. We grew 10 rows of corn, 25 tomato plants, and some pepper and okra. Since then, we have continued to grow the size of that garden to 5 acres and now we want more to farm.

My parents and grandparents (who lived next door) never forced us to work with them. We just wanted to. Instead of having lots of friends our age at school, we made friends with our family. (For which I am so grateful now!) We didn't watch TV (didn't even have one in the house) didn't play on the computer (only got one of those when we started college) and spent as much of our time outdoors as possible.

And yes, even after a hard days work building and gardening, my brother and I still enjoyed digging holes! I think its something that kids just like to do. We dug 7 holes that I know of, probably more! One we got 6 feet deep and were starting a tunnel before it collapsed! We had dreams of digging a hole with tunnels into the earth like a cave to be our hideout!

If it sounds like a childhood from the 1940's, you're right, it was! But now at age 24 and my brother age 21, we both are best of friends when many siblings hate each other. We have strong ties to our family, work on our family farm, enjoy life and have something to work towards in life so unlike many of our peers in college! I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything in the world! Yep, there were bad times but boy did we have fun!
-Rachel

When my 3 boys were young(er), they used to shoot bb guns, ride horses, play in the sandbox,Play with the dog, train dogs for obedience, swimming(big in the summer), help build/dig/fix anything that needed it, camping out, boating in the row boat, fishing, snowforts & snowmen (warning-don't let them build a fort under the pool deck!), nintendo on rainy days, assisting with fences, climbing trees (& buildings!). When they became teenagers we bought them fixer-up trucks for their first vehicle. It had to be road ready before they were allowed to drive.

The bad side was..and why they needed things to do...their cousin practically lived here(4 boys total), and they had "fun" rolling my youngest down a hills in a plastic barrel, spraypainting the inside camper in bright red streaks, mistakenly putting bb's through barn windows, wrestling, picking on youngest child, truck pulls in the pasture, M80's in buckets & barrels, sledding down the hill ONTO the partially frozen pond, and oh the things I've forgotten that made my hair gray!

Overall they grew well & today are very responsible, healthy, strong, knowledgeable young men working in their technical fields (well, last one is just starting to look for a job). Give them projects (like the trucks we got ours) to do and they will stay out of trouble (for the most part) & drug free.

Brendasue