Boredom teaches us that life isn\u2019t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n
By Pamela Paul<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m bored.\u201d It\u2019s a puny little phrase, yet it has the power to fill parents with a cascade of dread, annoyance and guilt. If someone around here is bored, someone else must have failed to enlighten or enrich or divert. And how can anyone \u2014 child or adult \u2014 claim boredom when there\u2019s so much that can and should be done? Immediately.<\/p>\n But boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it\u2019s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up \u2014 boredom is for boring people \u2014 boredom is useful. It\u2019s good for you.<\/p>\n If kids don\u2019t figure this out early on, they\u2019re in for a nasty surprise. School, let\u2019s face it, can be dull, and it isn\u2019t actually the teacher\u2019s job to entertain as well as educate. Life isn\u2019t meant to be an endless parade of amusements. \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d a mother says to her daughter in Maria Semple\u2019s 2012 novel, \u201cWhere\u2019d You Go, Bernadette.\u201d \u201cYou are bored. And I\u2019m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it\u2019s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it\u2019s on you to make life interesting, the better off you\u2019ll be.\u201d<\/p>\n People used to accept that much of life was boring. Memoirs of pre-21st-century life are rife with tedium. When not idling in drawing rooms, members of the leisured class took long walks and stared at trees. They went motoring and stared at more trees. Those who had to work had it a lot harder. Agricultural and industrial jobs were often mind-numbing; few people were looking to be fulfilled by paid labor. Children could expect those kinds of futures and they got used to the idea from an early age, left unattended with nothing but bookshelves and tree branches, and later, bad afternoon television.<\/p>\n Only a few short decades ago, during the lost age of under-parenting, grown-ups thought a certain amount of boredom was appropriate. And children came to appreciate their empty agendas. In an interview with GQ magazine, Lin-Manuel Miranda credited his unattended afternoons with fostering inspiration. \u201cBecause there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Nowadays, subjecting a child to such inactivity is viewed as a dereliction of parental duty. In a much-read story in The Times, \u201cThe Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,\u201d Claire Cain Miller cited a recent study that found that regardless of class, income or race, parents believed that \u201cchildren who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked. Every spare moment is to be optimized, maximized, driven toward a goal.<\/p>\n When not being uber-parented, kids today are left to their own devices \u2014 their own digital devices, that is. Parents preparing for a long car ride or airplane trip are like Army officers plotting a complicated land maneuver. Which movies to load onto the iPad? Should we start a new family-friendly podcast? Is this an O.K. time to let the kids play Fortnite until their brains melt into the back seat? What did parents in the \u201970s do when kids were bored in the way-back? Nothing! They let them breathe in gas fumes. Torture their siblings. And since it wasn\u2019t actually for wearing, play with the broken seatbelt.<\/p>\n If you complained about being bored back then, you were really asking for it. \u201cGo outside,\u201d you might get, or worse, \u201cClean your room.\u201d Was this fun? No. Was it helpful? Yes.<\/p>\n Because things happen when you\u2019re bored. Some of the most boring jobs I\u2019ve had were also the most creative. Working at an import factory after school, I pasted photos of ugly Peruvian sweaters onto sales sheets. My hands became encrusted with glue as the sweaters blurred into a clumpy sameness. For some reason, everything smelled like molasses. My mind had no choice but to drift into an elaborate fantasy realm. It\u2019s when you are bored that stories set in. Checking out groceries at the supermarket, I invented narratives around people\u2019s purchases. The man buying eggplant and a six-pack of Bud at 9 p.m.: Which was the must-get item and which the impulse purchase? How did my former fifth-grade teacher feel about my observing her weekly purchase of Nutter Butters?<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve truly settled into the anesthetizing effects of boredom, you find yourself en route to discovery. With monotony, small differences begin to emerge, between those trees, those sweaters. This is why so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you\u2019re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s not really the boredom itself that\u2019s important; it\u2019s what we do with it. When you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself. But unless we are faced with a steady diet of stultifying boredom, we never learn how.<\/p>\n The idea isn\u2019t that you suffer through crushing tedium indefinitely like Neville (\u201cN is for Neville who died of ennui\u201d) of \u201cThe Gashlycrumb Tinies.\u201d It\u2019s that you learn how to vanquish it. This may come in several forms: You might turn inward and use the time to think. You might reach for a book. You might imagine your way to a better job. Boredom leads to flights of fancy. But ultimately, to self-discipline. To resourcefulness.<\/p>\n The ability to handle boredom, not surprisingly, is correlated with the ability to focus and to self-regulate. Research has shown that people with attention disorders are particularly prone to boredom. It makes sense that in a hyper-stimulating world, what at first seems captivating now feels less so; what was once mildly diverting may now be flat-out dull.<\/p>\n It\u2019s especially important that kids get bored \u2014 and be allowed to stay bored \u2014 when they\u2019re young. That it not be considered \u201ca problem\u201d to be avoided or eradicated by the higher-ups, but instead something kids grapple with on their own.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve stopped training children to do this. Rather than teach them to absorb material that is slower, duller and decidedly two-dimensional, like a lot of worthwhile information is, schools cave in to what they say children expect: fun. Teachers spend more time concocting ways to \u201cengage\u201d students through visuals and \u201cinteractive learning\u201d (read: screens, games) tailored to their Candy Crushed attention spans. Kids won\u2019t listen to long lectures, goes the argument, so it\u2019s on us to serve up learning in easier-to-swallow portions.<\/p>\n But surely teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn\u2019t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails. One day, even in a job they otherwise love, our kids may have to spend an entire day answering Friday\u2019s leftover email. They may have to check spreadsheets. Or assist robots at a vast internet-ready warehouse.<\/p>\n This sounds boring, you might conclude. It sounds like work, and it sounds like life. Perhaps we should get used to it again, and use it to our benefit. Perhaps in an incessant, up-the-ante world, we could do with a little less excitement.<\/p>\n Pamela Paul is the editor of the Book Review and a co-author of the forthcoming book \u201cHow to Raise a Reader.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boredom teaches us that life isn\u2019t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency. By Pamela Paul \u201cI\u2019m bored.\u201d It\u2019s a puny little phrase, yet it has the power to fill parents with a cascade of dread, annoyance and guilt. If someone around here is bored, someone else must have failed to enlighten or enrich or divert. And how can anyone \u2014 child or adult \u2014 claim boredom when there\u2019s so much that can and should be done? Immediately. But boredom is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13300,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[71,44,72],"class_list":["post-13299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parenting","tag-creativity","tag-parenting","tag-self-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13301,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13299\/revisions\/13301"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raintreemontessori.org\/current\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}