“Mom, I'm bored!” The dulcet tones of my 7-year-old echo through our home.
Sitting in the kitchen, I pretend I’m playing the Statue Game. I try not to move a muscle. Ordinarily, I’m fabulous at this and can remain unusually still while body parts tingle and fall asleep. Today, though, I’m having hard a time. My helpful mom instincts are pushing me to get up and suggest activities to help my kid be unbored. But I’m trying my best to wait a bit. This summer, my son’s boredom may be the exact thing he needs.
When my kid was little, he was good at keeping himself occupied.
When eating out at a restaurant, a sugar packet and a gum wrapper were enough to amuse him. As he grew, he found more inventive ways to schedule his time. Whether it was dressing up as an astronaut-cowboy or building Lego towns, he was always creating a new adventure for himself. Last year, all that came to a halt.
After a year of remote learning where every minute until dinner was spent trying to catch up on homework, my son’s brain is now having a problem adjusting to unscheduled days without a screen.
That school screen gave him his daily everything. It planned his class meetings and provided his homework and social time.
I was hoping that once remote learning ended, there would be space for his imagination to pick up where it left off — but all that over-scheduling pushed my kid’s creative time to the side and apparently his imagination out along with it.
Boredom can be great because it’s a jumping-off place for creative thinking.
It's a blank slate where my kid can find a new interest that can last forever. So, I was thrilled when he didn’t know what to do with his summer free time. But it turns out all my son is interested in doing is announcing his boredom. Stepping into that once comfortable imaginative place feels awkward and he’s slow to find his groove.
Watching him waffle in this in-between space makes me want to jump in and be the boss of him like when he was 3 years old.
I want to help, but I wonder: Would that set him back even more? Deactivating my “mom help mode” isn’t easy. I’m trying to step back and let my kid learn how to schedule chunks of his own time. It’s an important life skill and I’d love to set the ground work now.
So, yeah, this summer may be boring, but I’m embracing it.
In taking a few parenting steps back, this will hopefully give my kid the space he needs to learn how to manage his time and discover a new interest in the process. His brain can again think outside the light-up box and remember the fun that happens away from a scheduled screen. Plus, maybe he can learn some of those “boring” skills that can last him a lifetime.
