Let the kids embrace boredom

Let the kids embrace boredom

We live in a world that never pauses, as we breathlessly jump from one task to another, one activity to another, one goal to another. We have somehow believed that a busy life is a successful life and that a happy life is based on doing this or that. Constantly. Ceaselessly. Endlessly and eternally. 

Boredom has no place in our lives anymore. As a matter of fact, it is a sin to be bored and reprehensible to give in to boredom or admit to it. If you wish for a prosperous life, buckle up and do, do, do. It is curious how a generation that grew up playing on the streets with the neighbour kids, being bored and inventing games not only has renounced boredom but has also convinced their children that boredom is bad.

Parents nowadays translate the children’s boredom as their failure to offer good parenting. Every weekend of the family is well planned; it includes visits to museums or galleries, theme parks, activity centres, day trips, playdates, and the list of “fun and interesting” activities goes on endlessly with the aspiration of preventing their kids from getting bored. Every afternoon after school is well curated with numerous and diverse extra-curricular activities until the evening when the exhausted child will go to sleep to prepare for another busy day.

The teachers are expected to entertain the students. Each day at school has to be a fabulous day full of amusing projects, where the children do not cease to smile and enjoy every minute of school life. Learning has to be fun, fun, fun, and in the case of a bored child, complaints are in place for bad and indifferent teaching. Well, sorry to break it to you, but teachers are not entertainers or clowns. Teachers teach and are in charge of quality teaching, and the school can sometimes be tedious, challenging, and laborious. Just like life.

Life is not unicorns and rainbows all the time. Far from it, life is also demanding, tough and, to a great extent, boring. You will have to make your own fun. You will have to make it enjoyable for yourself. Not someone else. You. And when we try to be cool parents by entertaining our children twenty-four-seven, we actually conceal them from the real world by offering a distorted picture of it as a perpetually fun place to live in. 

When a child yells “I’m bored”, they might as well be hungry, curious about their parents’ doings or seeking attention. Let the children be bored! You cannot imagine how valuable and necessary boredom is. Offer your child free time to do nothing and applaud their boredom. 

Boredom offers them the irreplaceable opportunity to dream, use their imagination and let it go wild, try out ideas, get excited and discover their skills and interests. Boredom helps them be independent and build their confidence and resilience. It allows them to develop problem-solving skills, organisational skills, and planning strategies when they come up with projects or games; it fosters creativity and holds them responsible for their own happiness. Boredom allows the kids to reflect on their own practices and behaviours, evaluate situations and feelings, regroup and plan future steps. 

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away”, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin has so accurately stated. It is not the boredom but what we do with it that proves its essentiality in our life.