Dialogue: Bored? Send 'em off to the farm

By SANDY BURGHAM

Ever notice that city kids whose homes are bursting with Christmas toys, bikes, swimming pools and trampolines still have the occasional audacity during the holidays to announce they are bored?

What happened to the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in them? It's been killed by over-zealous parents who assume the responsibility for their children's entertainment, that's what.

Eventually, if you sit it out, bored kids find their own fun. So, for those urbanites praying for school to start, it may be time to move to the country, where children who have nothing much to do have never been busier.

At our favourite Kiwi holiday spot there is an annual bush carnival where townie kids can experience the novelty of catching the greasy pig, sheep rides and other earthy activities.

As the city children pit their wits against their country cousins, my favourite unofficial event is spot the townie. It's a pretty safe bet that the kids who are absorbed in group angst about should we or shouldn't we, or are hurriedly putting on sandals and extra sunscreen, are young city wimps who need to learn to take a few risks.

The tougher country kids certainly have no qualms about riding backwards on a sheep with just a prayer and a good hind-leg grip between them and the hard summer clay.

And they seem to ride the woolly, bucking broncos for just a couple of lollies and the sheer hell of it.

Such children were among a youth group that, when taken on a trip to central Auckland, skipped the movies to ride on the escalators.

They are the same kids who, despite dwindling numbers at their remote schools, every year smash records in collecting aluminium cans, earning their school another computer in the process.

City children might consider can-collecting as scabbing; country kids are not obsessed with what it might look like.

Provincial kids are not stifled by the scourge of being cool. They are not pressured into buying the latest gear - from clothing to electronics - and presented with a strict code of behaviour. Their values and priorities are different and life still has a sense of challenge, adventure and discovery about it.

But don't assume it is all home-schooling and family singalongs. These country children are up at dawn to help out and they are riding the long trip on the school bus twice a day from as young as 5. They learn independence early, with the ability to make their own fun.

We have a young relative from what Aucklanders might refer to as one of our sleepier provinces who has started to spend a week of his holidays with us in the Big Smoke to broaden his horizons.

But it seems it is as much the adults and kids who come into contact with cousin Jake who have their lives enriched.

It is not so much that he learned to drive a motorbike at 4 and a car at 8, but more general competence and confidence that let him give anything a go.

Indeed, it would seem that while we say New Zealand is a great place to bring up kids, so many of our middle-class offspring bred in the suffocating compound that is Auckland suburbia are missing out on the best bits.

Last year some friends gave their children a farm holiday so they could experience herding cows, shearing sheep and the natural laws of the farm.

It seemed to have been an enlightening experience and was brought to bear these holidays at their luxury bach when they enlisted the help of their 9-year-old boy, Max, to stack a trailer-load of firewood.

As it turned into an all-day ordeal, they were taken with Max's quite obvious sense of satisfaction of a job well done.

Where they once could have expected complaints, this time he took great delight in declaring in a dramatic John Denveresque moment: "Oh Mum, I feel like a country boy."