Let. Them. Be. Bored.
When I look back at my own childhood, the memories are often coated in a fug of boredom. I think back to afternoons spent following my mother around the antique showrooms she loved so much, or being stuck in my father’s medical office for hours, waiting for him to finish his ward rounds so he could take me home. These experiences always felt like moments of exquisite cruelty, designed specifically to leave me dulled. Yet when I burrow further into those memories, I remember a different aspect, too: the fantastical Narnias I discovered behind those dusty old cupboards; the strange words and mind-bending concepts I tried to piece together from my dad’s books and journals. This was the inevitable flipside to boredom, the feeling that the world had layers far beyond what I’d previously encountered.
What if our quest to supercharge our children’s lives is costing them an essential part of what it means to be a kid: boredom?
“Twenty minutes is about all it normally takes for a child to find something to entertain themselves,” says social psychologist Dr Helen Street. “Which can feel like an eternity when your child is whining and unhappy, but, given time, children will always find something to do.” Street is the founder of Positive Schools, an organisation dedicated to helping schools nurture kids’ wellbeing and creativity. One of her biggest crusades is for the reclamation of unstructured space in
