Why it’s good for your child to be bored. Really!

After an entire day of outdoor activity – biking, playing soccer in the park, street hockey in the driveway, a trip for ice cream and a rousing round of hide and seek – my son plopped his little body down on our front stoop and let out a huge sigh.

“I’m bored.”

Seriously? He takes a 30-second break from a non-stop festival of fun and he’s bored?

Normally, this would drive me crazy. But instead, I smiled brightly and said, “Great! Being bored is good for you!”

And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

British psychology professor Dr. Richard Ralley, a senior lecturer at Edgehill University in Lancashire, has been researching the roots and benefits of boredom for the past five years. He believes boredom has received a bad rap, and that empty time is an evolutionary necessity. Boredom, it turns out, might actually be valuable for children.

“There seems to be a great concern with children’s boredom, (which) may say something about our culture and perhaps parental guilt,” says Dr. Ralley. “The opposite of boredom is not excitement, so parents should not feel that they have to arrange back-to-back activities such as theme park visits.”

So why upon hearing those two oh-so-common words – ‘I’m bored’ – do so many parents not only become irritated but also extremely stressed?

“Mothers are terrified their kids are going to be bored, and we’re terrified that if we allow them to be bored, we’re bad parents,” says pediatrician Dr. Meg Meeker, best-selling author of The Ten Habits of Happy Mothers: Reclaiming our Passion, Purpose, and Sanity.

“And just the opposite is true: the parent that teaches their child that they can live with and pull out of boredom is a wonderful parent, because teaching kids how to deal with boredom is an extremely important life skill.”
Tanya Zelyuk, a Toronto mother of seven-year-old twins and a three-year-old, thinks enrolling kids in way too many activities feeds into the culture of boredom.

“Kids are being raised in a world with so much outside stimulation,” notes Zelyuk. “The minute there’s a bit of downtime, kids are stumped and don’t know how to actually entertain themselves.”

Dr. Meeker, who is a mother of four, agrees, noting that “our kids are recipients of activities. They’re spoon-fed entertainment all through life and they never learn to get their imagination going. We have kids graduating college who just want to be entertained: they want to fly around the world. I see my own kids want to do this. A nine-to-five job in a bank? Are you kidding me? That’s boring! Changing diapers day after day? That’s boring! Our days are filled with things that are boring, and if we don’t teach kids how to deal with boredom, we’ve really done them an enormous disservice.”

Children who don’t have ample time and space that they need to learn to fill don’t use or build creative skills, explains Dr. Meeker. “And that’s an active process that every child needs to do; it’s very important for intellectual growth and for brain development.”

Zelyuk gets so aggravated when her children complain about being bored that she sends them to their rooms for half an hour.
“There’s a lot of groaning and moaning about it, but 10 minutes into this ‘punishment’, I hear creativity going on,” she says. “My son will be building something, my daughter plays school with her dolls. That’s healthier than staring at a computer screen, clicking buttons.”

Learning how to deal with boredom is not only a crucial life skill, it’s also the way kids learn to be  happy, adds Dr. Meeker. “You have to create happiness: it doesn’t just happen to you. It’s creating something out of nothing that the real joy begins to happen.”

So the next time your child whines, ‘Mom, I’m bored!’, be sure to grin and say, ‘Fabulous! Let me know how it all works out.’

Wendy Helfenbaum is a writer and television producer in Montreal at http://www.taketwoproductions.ca