What seemed like yesterday and a million years ago, our family took an afternoon trip to the mountains. It was a beautiful spring day filled with blue-sky clouds and the anticipation of a lovely hike with our 8-year-old son.
Our son’s backseat was strewn with books and magazines to occupy his time. Conversations were filled with the absurd and the enlightened, sometimes at the same time. I was fascinated with how the world was seen through the eyes of an 8-year-old.
Still, I remember that family day as if it were a minute ago. Our son staring out the window looking at the clouds. I figured he was bored, so I asked him “What’cha thinking?” His reply will stay with me until the end of my existence. “Papa, could you not interrupt me right now. I’m daydreaming.”
That’s when it dawned on me. He had failed at boredom. He didn’t want to read. Or converse. He wanted to daydream. And that was the brilliance of his failure. He created something out of nothing. He had left boredom behind.
It was at that moment I understood the Beauty of Boredom. Because without it, we can’t move. We don’t think. We can’t create. It was the greatest gift that we as parents are taking away from our kids. And we don’t even know it.
If our kids can’t learn to be bored, then they can’t fail at being bored. And how, pray tell, do you fail at boredom? You fail at boredom by doing, creating, or inventing something.
And guess what was discovered when two kids got bored at the same time. Yep—they discovered playing! (Also known as being “un-bored but that doesn’t sound as fun as playing.)
When you play, you solve so many childhood problems at once. Kids learn how to converse with real words, face to face (not Facetime to Facetime). They learn how to socialize without parents helicoptering over their every interaction. They learn how to listen because that’s what you do when you talk. They learn to move, which is exercising but really called playing. (Adults call exercising “working out” and it sure doesn’t sound like playing.)
You can cheat at boredom. It’s called a cell phone, also known as “mind drivel.” It’s a brain-altering drug intended to keep you from being bored. I’ve watched over the years as the soul-sucking digital addiction started to take place in kids all around me, resulting in “un-kids,” all gleefully drowning in tidal waves of dopamine (which is the drug inside your brain that makes you want to endlessly scroll till the end of time, “liking” everything imaginable, and simultaneously texting every person known and unknown to you).
Adults are equally to blame. I soon realized that cell phones are becoming the new parents as they woefully abdicated their usefulness to walk their parental talk. Heck, I was even accused of being a “bad parent” because my son didn’t have a cell phone yet. (He didn’t get one until high school, sort of like getting your driver’s permit as part of the ritual of becoming an adult.)
You thought helicopter moms were a thing? How about drone moms? They know their kids everywhere and everything, 24/7. It’s a form of kid suffocation in which kids have no say in anything about anything—except for posting on their social media sites which is the only true form of freedom they have anymore. So, we blindly push them into the digital world, cell phone glued to hand, because we won’t allow them to do anything in the real world. Yeah. Talk about being mollycoddled to death.
Kids have lost the art of being kids.
You want to create the best human being in the world? Let’s let our kids fail, play, fall, run, listen, create, jump, invent, and learn as real adults-in-training without us always poking are noses into everything they do. Some things yes. But the real gift is learning when to butt out, and learning when to teach them again about the real Beauty of Boredom.
