"I'm bored" is treated as a complaint. It is closer to a weather report: conditions are now right for something to happen.
The experimental case for this is older than the current panic. Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire gave people a genuinely boring task and then asked them to think of uses for an everyday object. The bored group produced more ideas, and better ones, than the group that had not been bored.
Boredom, it turns out, is not the absence of thinking. It is an uncomfortable state that pushes a mind to go and find something — and the finding is where the interesting things live.
What we replaced it with
A modern childhood has almost no unfilled time in it. The gap between activities is filled with a screen. The car journey is filled. The waiting room is filled. The ten minutes before dinner is filled.
Each individual instance is completely reasonable. Nobody wants a meltdown in a waiting room. But the cumulative effect is a child who has never had to sit in the discomfort long enough to reach the other side of it, where the ideas are.
And a device is very good at ending boredom instantly, which means it never converts into anything.
The awkward middle bit
Here is what nobody warns you about. When you stop filling the gaps, you do not get a creative child. You get a whining one.
The first fifteen minutes are miserable. They will follow you around the kitchen announcing the boredom as though it were an injury. This is not the plan failing — the discomfort is the engine, and it has to run a while before it goes anywhere.
Somewhere in minute twenty, without announcing it, they will start doing something. It will usually be strange. It will often involve furniture. That is the bit you were waiting for.
How to survive being the parent in the room
- Do not solve it. "Why don't you..." ends the process. A shrug and "you'll think of something" keeps it running.
- Do not take it personally. They are not accusing you of failing to entertain them, even though it sounds exactly like that.
- Leave materials, not plans. Paper, tape, boxes, string. Available, not suggested.
- Protect the mess. The thing they invent will nearly always be inconvenient. Deciding in advance which inconveniences you can live with saves you from ending the game to save the rug.
One small experiment
Pick one routinely filled gap this week — the car, the waiting room, the twenty minutes before dinner — and leave it empty. Not the whole day. One gap.
Then hold your nerve for twenty minutes, which will be the longest twenty minutes of your week, and see what walks out of it.
