Why boredom is good for children

“I’m bored.”

Two words, in a very particular voice, usually about forty minutes into a wet Sunday. Most of us hear them as a problem to fix, and we have the fixes ready: a game, a film, a tablet, a trip to the shops. The complaint stops, the afternoon moves along, and everybody is relieved.

We would like to make the case for leaving it unfixed. Not every time, and not for ever, but often enough for something interesting to have room to happen.

What happens after twenty minutes

Leave a bored child alone with it and watch, and you will see the complaint has a shape. First comes the announcement, repeated, sometimes from flat on the floor. Then a sulky lap of the house, picking things up and putting them down again. Then a lull, when nothing much seems to be going on at all.

And then, if nobody has stepped in, something starts. A box becomes a boat. Two toys that have never met strike up a conversation. A notebook turns up and a map is drawn of a country that did not exist ten minutes ago. The child who was bored is now busy, and busy with something nobody suggested.

That stretch of nothing is not wasted time before the good part. It is the good part on its way. Imagination does not switch on when a child is being entertained. It switches on when a child is not, and has to do something about it.

What a study found

This is not only a parent’s hunch. In two small studies of adults, researchers at the University of Central Lancashire asked people to do a deliberately dull task, copying out or reading telephone numbers from a directory, before a creative one. In a first study with 80 participants and a second with 90, the people who had been bored first came up with more creative answers afterwards than those who had not, and the authors suggest daydreaming is what links the two (Mann and Cadman, 2014, Creativity Research Journal).

It is a small study, and of adults rather than children, so we would not build a whole parenting philosophy on it. But it matches what anyone who has watched a bored child for long enough has seen. A mind left idle wanders off, and comes back carrying things.

Why the screen changes the sum

A generation ago, the wet Sunday had no exit. A child had to sit through the boredom until they reached the far side of it. Now there is always a way out, and it fits in a pocket.

That matters because a screen does more than fill the gap. It removes the gap. A child who reaches for a tablet at the first flicker of boredom never gets as far as the lull, and so never gets to the box that becomes a boat. The complaint is answered so fast that whatever it was leading to never arrives.

This is not an argument against screens, which are part of life and often good. It is an argument for leaving some gaps unfilled. A child who is never bored never finds out what they would do about it.

What to do about a bored child

Honestly, not much. But a few things help the nothing along.

Say “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” Kindly, once, and then go back to whatever you were doing. It tells them the boredom is theirs to solve, and that you believe they can.

Keep a shelf of dull materials. Cardboard, tape, string, old sheets, a torch, paper, pens that work. Not toys that do one thing, but stuff that does nothing until somebody decides what it is. A good box is worth more than most of what comes inside one.

Allow mess and noise. Imagination at full stretch looks like a den built from every cushion in the house. If it has to stay tidy, it will not happen.

Give them something to wait for. A story that arrives in instalments, a seed that takes a fortnight, a letter from a grandparent due on Tuesday. Waiting is a kind of boredom with a question inside it, and the question keeps the mind turning things over: what will happen, what will I do, how will it end?

Be bored yourself, where they can see. Put the phone in a drawer on a Sunday afternoon and stare out of the window for a while. It is the only way children learn that an empty hour is nothing to be afraid of.

The fortnight in between

We think about this a lot at Journee, because our stories are built around a gap. A letter arrives, your child reads a chapter in which they are the hero and their family are in the cast, and at the end a P.S. asks them to choose what happens next. Then nothing arrives for a while. In that while, a child who is a little bored starts to wonder: what is behind the door they chose, what the dog will do, whether the character they are worried about is all right. That wondering is the point of the pause, not a flaw in the delivery. You can read how the letters work at /how-it-works, and more about making room for imagination in how to encourage imagination in children.

So the next time you hear those two words in that particular voice, try the one sentence, and then wait. Forty minutes is a long time. Something usually turns up.