Let Children Experience Boredom

"I cannot plant imagination into my children. I can, however, provide an environment where their creativity is not just another mess to clean up but welcome evidence of grappling successfully with boredom." – Nancy Blakey

While Søren Kierkegaard warned, “Boredom is the root of all evil,” psychologists, neurologists, and child development experts disagree. We may fear an idle teen or toddler (and every age in between) discovering trouble through idleness, studies show letting a child experience boredom is better for their creativity and problem-solving than handing them a screen or over-scheduling their lives.   

Experts agree: just let them be bored. No rescuing, no ideas, no schedule, and no screens. Just let our children sit in the stew of inactivity. But why?

Because boredom, according to Italian Human and Social Sciences researcher Palmira Faraci, leads to one of three outcomes and two of them are beneficial. In her analysis of the Boredom Proneness Scale, she found three typical solutions to boredom were “internal stimulation: creativity, apathy, and external stimulation-challenge.” Two of these, when it comes to children and their development, have clear benefits.

These advantages are being explored at length by researchers. This research from Texas A& M University shows that boredom encourages people to seek new goals and experiences. The researchers argue that, “By motivating desire for change from the current state, boredom increases opportunities to attain social, cognitive, emotional and experiential stimulation that could have been missed.”

This University of Lancashire study concurs, finding that boredom in subjects brought forth daydreaming and innovative connections that led to more creativity. As did this study published in the Journal of Associative Psychology, which found boredom promoted “associative thought” or deeper connections between potentially unrelated ideas.

Catherine Pearson, in a recent article (6/19/23) in The New York Times says: “Parents sometimes fear boredom, and the havoc it can wreak around the house…But free time carves out room for discovery.”

A leading psychologist, author, and researcher on boredom Andreas Elpidorou, from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville, puts it this way in his article entitled The Bright Side of Boredom in the journal Frontiers in Psychology: “In broad strokes, the picture is as follows: on account of its affective, volitional, and cognitive aspects, boredom motivates the pursuit of a new goal when the current goal ceases to be satisfactory, attractive, or meaningful to the agent. Boredom helps to restore the perception that one's activities are meaningful or significant... Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and products.”

So, while defeatist apathy might be a consequence of boredom – say, in a teenager wandering the streets all summer – it is twice as likely to expand the minds of our children. Perhaps this is why parent educator and author Nancy Blakey says, “I want to allow my children to be bored while they are young and under my watchful eye. To preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations... Life is bound by what we can envision. I cannot plant imagination into my children. I can, however, provide an environment where their creativity is not just another mess to clean up but welcome evidence of grappling successfully with boredom. It is possible for boredom to deliver us to our best selves, the ones that long for risk and illumination and unspeakable beauty. If we sit still long enough, we may hear the call behind boredom. With practice, we may have the imagination to rise up from the emptiness and answer.”

Waldorf education takes an active approach to cultivating and supporting children’s imaginations. A large part of that approach is allowing children unstructured playtime. The free mind, unbound by prescriptive activity, can envision, create and dream. These are crucial real-life skills, with important benefits that pay off for an entire lifetime when solving problems, approaching divergent thinking, and even managing boredom.