I want to recommend Darby Saxbe’s recent piece in the Washington Post about the benefits of boredom for children.
She argues that we are over-parenting our children with costs to both ourselves and to them.
And she has some really good advice on cultivating boredom:
An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.
Sounds like my childhood.
Why cultivate boredom?
Neuroscientists have shown that a bored mind is a busy mind. Think about yourself. When hanging in a waiting room without a phone (do you even remember hanging out in a waiting room without your phone?), first we let our eyes wander. We pick up random literature and maybe learn something about vaccine schedules or dental care or colon cancer.
Then, our eyes start wandering over our fellows. We notice what they’re wearing. We wonder about their relationships. We silently criticize or admire their parenting.
Often we think about our own relationships and the interactions we’ve had with others.
All of these things consolidate connections in our mind, increase social awareness, and improve knowledge. Kids learning and kids thinking about others? These are things that most parents aspire to for their kids.
Second, the surgeon general of the United States recently warned that parents are feeling unsustainably high levels of stress. Part of that is due to the lack of support for families—inflexible work schedules, unaffordable child care, and lack of close adult ties. An additional form of stress is the unreasonably high standards that we hold for ourselves and our parenting. My mom was terrific. She also had five kids. I clearly remember her giving us rocks and glue and paints to play with and telling us to make stone people. I remember her throwing us out the back door and sending us to get some neighbors and start a kickball game. I definitely remember canoeing and sailing and camping and hiking as a family and visiting relatives and hanging out watching TV.
What I don’t remember is either of my parents playing our games with us. Our family played games we all liked, but it was not a child-focused activity, it was family game night. Note this contrast. My parents bought blocks and we played with them in the living room while they cleaned or cooked or mowed the lawn. My husband and I sat on the floor and built Ka-Boom towers with our sons. My kids weren’t bored. But my husband and I kind of were. Allowing them to play by themselves would have taught them something very different than having us structure the activity for them so they were always challenged and engaged. Like how to entertain themselves.
Dr. Linda Caldwell has studied boredom for decades. One important function of boredom is that it allows you to learn what kinds of things you like to do and what kinds of things you don’t. In addition, it encourages you to try new things and structure your environment to suit yourself.
For example, my brother, a teacher, tells me that what children need to become fluent readers is to engage in sustained silent reading. In other words, they need to have a book in their hand and keep going. It’s a skill. When do they do that? Often because they have nothing else to do that is more engaging and less effortful. And they do it best when they can choose books they really like. My son became a fluent reader on a long car trip to visit his grandparents. I handed him a Calvin and Hobbes comic book. Six hours later he was still turning pages.
Dr. Caldwell observed a real cultural shift in children’s opportunities to shape their own experiences over the last few decades. In traditional societies, children spend a lot of time with adults, but are engaged in helping or observing. Play is with—and usually supervised by—peers. Boomer children had similar experiences, in that we spent a great deal of time loosely supervised and creating our own experiences—and complaining of being bored. As more children grew up in supervised day care settings, they spent more and more time having adults shape their time. This is especially true in high-quality care. Story time. Nap time. Exercise time. Coloring time. Music time. All are incremented in small blocks of time geared to maximize engagement and reduce boredom.
School-aged children engage in adult structured time all day. Because most parents now work, children are often in after-school programs that also structure their activities.
When we finally let them take care of themselves after school, is it any wonder that they lack the skills to find activities that they really love? Or that they lean into scrolling, video games, or other activities that have more potential to harm? Or that they don’t really know what they like on their own?
The balance of boredom with opportunity is a great area for parents to focus their eager desire to help kids grow. How can we encourage kids to find things they love to do—play with dolls, read books, draw, stare at clouds, build computer games, or gossip with friends?
