My children are bored quite a lot.
I want to be accurate about this because sometimes when parents say their children are bored they mean their children are pleasantly pottering around with a look of mild contentment. That is not what I mean.
I mean they come and find me and tell me they are bored, in a tone of voice that implies this is my fault personally and that I am expected to do something about it. There is sometimes a second visit when the first one produces nothing. Occasionally a third, delivered with added emphasis.
I do not do something about it.
This has not always been true. For quite a long time I did remedy it – I suggested things, redirected, re-engaged, and occasionally just switched the television on because sometimes that is what survival looks like and I, too, am human and have no interest in pretending otherwise.
But I stopped. And the boredom, which I had been treating as a problem to be solved, turned out not to be one.
What boredom actually is
Boredom gets a bad reputation, and I think most of it is undeserved.
We treat it as an absence – of fun, of stimulation, of something to do. We respond to it as though it is a gap to be filled. The instinct to fill it is almost immediate. It’s not necessarily a bad instinct: it obviously comes from care, from the reasonable desire to see your child engaged and happy.
But boredom is not just an absence of something. It has a direction. It’s the discomfort that precedes play – a kind of pressure that, if you can sit with it without intervening, reliably produces something: imagination, creativity, play.
Children who are never allowed to be bored – who are always rescued from it by an adult or a screen or an organised activity – never get to find out what they would have come up with on the other side. They learn that boredom is a problem and that problems are solved by adults. And so they never develop the capacity to solve it themselves.
This is not a failure of character or imagination. It is a skill gap, and like most skill gaps, it comes from lack of practice. The internal bridge between nothing is happening and I can make something happen is built across repeated encounters with boredom that were not immediately fixed. Every time you stay in the kitchen for another five minutes, every time you say something will come to you and mean it – you are creating the conditions for that bridge to be built.
What the research tells us, and what I observed about boredom in children
There is good evidence that children need unstructured time – time where nothing is directed, nothing is organised, nothing is provided – to develop the kind of flexible, imaginative thinking that structured activities do not produce.
Jonathan Haidt’s work on childhood development makes clear that the decline of free, unsupervised play from the 1990s onwards – replaced by structured activities, organised sports, and eventually screens – has corresponded with a measurable decrease in children’s capacity for independent engagement, and a measurable increase in anxiety. The connection is not coincidental. Children are built to encounter small difficulties and work through them. When the small difficulties are always removed before they arrive, the internal apparatus that handles them does not develop properly.
What I observed in my own children matched this. The more I solved the boredom, the sooner it returned and the more loudly it presented. The less I solved it, the more capable they became of solving it themselves – and the less often they needed to.
What happens when I stay in the kitchen
The complaints continue. I want to be clear about that. My children didn’t miraculously start liking being bored.
That’s because doing nothing about expressed boredom does not make the expressions of boredom stop.
My children still come and tell me they are bored. They still look at me with expectation. One of them, at age six, went through a period of expressing boredom with the formal gravity of someone filing a complaint.
What changes is not the complaints. It is what happens after the complaints don’t produce results.
After a week or two of consistent non-intervention – warm, unhurried, not-solving non-intervention – children start, tentatively, to sort it out themselves.
And what they sort it out into is consistently more interesting than anything I would have suggested anyway.
What my children do on the other side of boredom
Over the past eighteen months, my children have: built and operated an elaborate courtroom in the living room (soft toy tried and found guilty of unspecified crimes, sentence delivered solemnly into a notebook); constructed a drainage system in the garden using old guttering that they operated with increasing scientific rigour across three afternoons; developed a working taxonomy of the insects in our garden based on their own observation; and invented a card game with rules so complicated that I have still not fully grasped them after watching it played on many occasions.
None of these were my ideas. None of them were produced by anything I bought or set up or organised. They came from the space that opens when boredom has nowhere to go except inward.
That is what boredom is, when you let it run its course. Not an absence. A pressure that will eventually produce something.
The quality difference
There is something worth noting about what comes from boredom versus what comes from an adult suggestions.
When I suggest an activity, the children engage with it. They enjoy it. It lasts a reasonable time and then it is over.
When the activity comes from their own boredom, it develops. It comes back the next day. The courtroom ran a second trial. The drainage system was refined. The insect taxonomy was updated. The card game had two formal rule revisions.
Play that comes from a child’s own imagination has a depth that provided play rarely matches. Not because the imagination is superior to what an adult could suggest, but because the child is invested differently. It is theirs. They built it from nothing. The stakes are different.
Boredom is the condition that makes this kind of play possible. Not comfortable boredom. The agitating, restless, nothing-is-happening kind. That is the productive kind.
The particular problem with screen boredom
There are different kinds of boredom, and they are not all equally productive.
Ordinary boredom – the kind that comes from an unoccupied afternoon with no screen preceding it – is manageable. Children who have some practice with it move through it into play within twenty or thirty minutes if you stay out of the way. The discomfort is real but not acute.
Post-screen boredom is harder. When a screen goes off, the boredom that follows contains an additional element: the gap between what the brain was doing and what it is now being asked to do. Screens are fast and stimulating and designed to be compelling. The ordinary afternoon, in comparison, requires effort – the effort to generate the next thing rather than have it delivered.
In the first twenty minutes after a screen goes off, that requirement feels larger than it usually would. The child is not just bored. They are also recalibrating from one pace to another. The complaints are louder and the resolution takes longer.
This is why I try to keep the stretches of unoccupied time unoccupied – not preceded by something that makes the transition into ordinary time harder. Screens later in the day, not as a precursor to the hours when we most need children to be self-generating.
What I actually do when my kids tell me they’re bored
I say: “I know.”
Not dismissively. Genuinely. Boredom is uncomfortable and they are right to name it.
Then: “Something will come to you.”
And I go back to what I was doing. Calmly, warmly, without drama, without solutions.
Mind you, the first time you do this, this does obviously not satisfy them. The second time either. By the third or fourth time of receiving the same calm, unsolvingly-sympathetic response, most children give up and go and sort it out themselves.
Which is, precisely, the point.
What I think about boredom
I think it is one of the best things that can happen to a child on an ordinary afternoon.
Not as a lesson I am deliberately administering or some grand philosophy I am enforcing. Just as a natural part of a childhood that has enough space in it for the discomfort to arise and the play to follow.
My children are bored more than most of their peers, probably. They are also more capable of entertaining themselves, more inventive when left alone, and considerably less dependent on me to make the day happen.
I do not think those things are unrelated. In fact, I believe they are fairly directly connected.
The boredom is doing something to them. You just have to leave it alone long enough to find out what.