B.B. Gray Resources

Gray, B.B. (1988, October/November). When kids are bored. The Disney Channel Magazine.

OVERVIEW

We are living in an age that hears young people often saying that they are bored. Adults shake their heads, wondering how this is possible. We would love the opportunity to be "bored," but the hectic pace of life just to keep up gives us very little "down" time. We need to look at the reasons kids that feel bored and determine its causes.

Janice Foster, M.A., a certified educational specialist, has good insight into this subject. When a child professes boredom, parents feel they need to become entertainers or offer alternate things to do. Foster says "DON’T!" She feels that "...a child needs to learn to self-start, to problem-solve. Therefore, say something to the child like ‘I’m sorry to hear you are bored. What are you going to do about it?’ "

Children need the freedom to explore and spend time just thinking and imagining. They do not need to be structured and provided with constant answers. The children who seem to be most bored are the ones who are heavily structured with activities. They have no time just to play with their friends down the street. Foster says this type of child is "overly programmed and run ragged" with no decision-making opportunities within the schedule. "A child experiences so much structure and so much education by the time he or she gets to kindergarten that they’re bored," says Dr. Helen Lederer, a pediatrician. Her theory suggests that parents try to compensate for the guilt of working and living such hectic lives themselves. The final outcome is that children seem to be missing out on the opportunity for independent discovery—the kind that offers excitement and a personal sense of accomplishment. The way to achieve that is by high levels of unstructured time, an approach with which today’s parents are uncomfortable.

There is a need to be alert and to know the difference between boredom and other problems. Foster says, "Listen to the underlying mood, to the tone when a child says he is bored. If it’s a ho-hum, what’s-there-to-do attitude, send them exploring. But if you hear sadness, frustration, anger, or if the boredom seems associated with school or with a weekend away from home, there might be something else going on."

Boredom can also be a preservation of one’s self-esteem. We often speak of boredom when a problem or situation is beyond us and our abilities. We (children included) do not like to admit we cannot do something. Therefore, we distract others from the real reason and hide it under the catch-all attitude of boredom.

The word "boredom" is used and abused heavily in the culture today. We need to take it back to its grass-roots meaning and help children overcome it with exciting solutions that they discover themselves. When imagination is allowed to conquer boredom, the possibilities are endless.

IMPLICATIONS

• Those who work with youth need to figure out new ways to deal with kids’ boredom. Why do we seem so anxious to make it disappear for the child, instead of having the child cope with it and learn how to overcome it for himself or herself?
• Adults need to experience less structured time and allow themselves to dream. Remember what it was like to discover new things for yourself.
• When people emerge from the flat moments of boredom, they have more self-esteem. It is encouraging to know that one can self-entertain and does not need lots of props to do so.
• Adults rob kids of childhood if they do not allow them hours upon hours of freedom exploring their surroundings. One does need to oversee free time, but should allow the child to direct and structure it.
• It is healthy to learn to relax within ourselves and our own dreams. We need to balance this for ourselves and then pass it on to the kids.

Anne Montague cCYS