Recently, my 5 year-old son has started proclaiming, “I’m booooorrrrred.”

 

My reaction?

 

Good. When I was a kid I distinctly remember my gran telling me that, “Only boring people get bored.”

 

She never really elaborated, and I’m still not too sure what she meant, but I like it. And I’ve started saying the same thing to my son.

 

My thinking is this.

 

By saying he’s bored, he expects his mum and me to immediately remedy his boredom by taking him out, getting him a new game, letting him watch TV or play the Wii. This is despite the fact that we’ll already have done heaps with him that morning, day, week or month. He’s looking for yet another external source of gratification (in my layman’s terms) and this is not sustainable.

 

So we encourage him to sit and draw, read a book, look for bugs in the garden, do a jigsaw etc. Something that engages his brain from the inside.

 

As parents it’s taken us a while to accept that this is OK. It is not bad parenting. We don’t have to entertain him 24-7. Especially now his 2 year-old sister is cranking things up a bit in the “Terrible Twos” department.

 

Dr Theresa Belton from the University of East Anglia in the UK, is an expert in the impact of emotions on behaviour and learning. She believes that boredom could be an “uncomfortable feeling” and that society had “developed an expectation of being constantly occupied and constantly stimulated”.

 

Like me, Dr Belton believes that this is not a good thing. It’s unsustainable, and what’s more, she says, “Some young people who do not have the interior resources or the responses to deal with that boredom creatively then sometimes end up smashing up bus shelters or taking cars out for a joyride.”

 

Dr Belton has studied the impact of television and videos on children’s writing, said: “When children have nothing to do now, they immediately switch on the TV, the computer, the phone or some kind of screen. The time they spend on these things has increased.

 

“But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them.”

 

It is this sort of thing that stimulates the imagination, she said, while the screen “tends to short circuit that process and the development of creative capacity”.

 

So in short, if your kids says they’re bored…

 

Good!

Author: Dan Haesler, he is a teacher, consultant, and speaker at the Mental Health & Wellbeing of Young People seminars. He is the co-developer of Happy Schools and blogs at http://danhaesler.com/ and tweets at @danhaesler