DO YOU scrunch your face in frustration when your hear your child mutter the dreaded phrase, “I’m bored”?

Take a deep breath and unclench your fists — guess what? Being bored is actually good for children and not a sign of bad parenting. Psychologists report children are bombarded with constant entertainment through technology, bedrooms full of toys and a schedule of activities that would make the Prime Minister’s head spin.

Where is the time to stare vacantly out of the window, daydream, or just sit and think clearly and calmly?

Research shows boredom, or the frustration that comes with not being engaged in anything at all, offers great benefits for children in particular. It allows the mind a moment to stop and rest, but ultimately boredom is the pathway to creative thinking and imaginative play.

A bored mind, it is argued, will seek something more interesting to do. Dr Helen Street, a social psychologist and creator of the Positive Schools Initiative, which promotes mental health and wellbeing conferences in primary and secondary schools, says children need to experience boredom more than ever before. “We are seeing a massive creativity deficit in kids.  “A child’s school life is more structured than ever and from an earlier age than ever before,” Dr Street says.

“There is this idea that school is a race and the sooner you get started on it the better you’ll be. Then of course there is the advent of technology, which has taken over our lives in the past decade. It allows children to spend an awful lot of downtime passively engaged with screens and leaves kids with very little time for unstructured play.

“As a result we are seeing a massive creativity deficit in kids. People often mistake creativity with having an artistic skill, but that is not what we are talking about here.
“Creativity is important because it allows you to actively engage in life, to connect with people and pursue your passions. But to do that you have to learn to be self-directed.
An expert says technology is not the sole culprit for a lack of self-directed play in homes and schools.

“This is difficult for a child who has grown up having every demand met by their parents and every moment filled in with scheduled, structured activity, with little or no choice or control over what happens next.”

The value of boredom is not a new theory, famed philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out the benefits as early as 1930 in his book The Conquest of Happiness, where he states “a child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil”.

In 1999 a pair of German public health officers were so concerned with the amount of toys provided to children in preschools they introduced a bold plan. Called Der Spielzeugfreie Kindergarten, or the nursery without toys, they removed every toy from a preschool for three months of the year, leaving only tables, chairs and the odd blanket.

“One of the best things they can do for their child is allow time for regular free play every day.” The observers noted that on the first day the children sat hesitantly staring at each other, but by the second day they were using the blankets and tables to create castles and cubbies, and the chairs to simulate trains. The teachers reported the children concentrated, socialised and communicated better following this period.

Put simply, the theory shows that bored children will seek out a more satisfying activity because the actual act of being bored is so lacking, the mind will naturally start to seek out more enjoyment.

It’s easy to blame technology for the zombie-like ways children sit for hours clutching their devices or staring at the television. But Dr Street says technology is not the sole culprit for a lack of self-directed play in homes and schools.  “Self-directed play allows children to engage in an activity where they have choice and control over what they do,” Dr Street says.

“It allows a child to become so totally engrossed in their activity that time passes without them even noticing. It’s called being ‘in slow’ or ‘in the zone’ and it’s a wonderful feeling but, as parents, we don’t allow enough of it.”

Counsellor and psychotherapist Georgina Manning created the program Peaceful Kids, which instructs children on how to achieve mindfulness and meditation in schools, after she noticed a spike in stress and anxiety in children as young as five. The two-day program, taught in schools across Australia, teaches children to be fully present through a range of exercises.

“The program teaches kids simple activities like how to notice their breath when their mind wanders,” the Wellbeing For Kids director says.

“But it’s also important for kids to engage in informal mindfulness, which is just free, creative play, things like playing with Lego, making robots from cardboard, building an ant farm, dressing up. This kind of informal mindfulness allows them to become fully immersed and it clears the mind.

“If a child never has the opportunity to rest their mind — and sleep alone doesn’t do it — it can lead to anxiety, ongoing stress response, perfectionism, generally being unhappy and burning out.”

She says the main elements in society preventing boredom is too much technology, over-scheduling activities and having a stressed family life.

“Parents often feel guilty if their child isn’t constantly engaged in structured activities like sport, music, dance, drama and tutoring,” she says.

“But one of the best things they can do for their child is allow time for regular free play every day.”

DOING BATTLE WITH SCREENS
MOOREBANK mum Kylie Reynolds remembers playing with friends, riding her bike and swimming in the backyard pool after coming home from school. But the mum to Jay, 12, Kayla, 10 and Lachlan, four months, says a lot has changed from one generation to the next. She says she does daily battle with her children to get them off their screens and play like kids used to. “I think parenting kids today is a lot more complicated and challenging than when I was a kid,” she says. “And as far as I can see, the main reason is technology.

Kylie Reynolds with children Jay 12, Lachlan 17 weeks and Kayla, 10, near their home in Moorebank.  “Kids have such a dependence of those screens and when I put the hammer down and say enough is enough, they really fight me on it. Kayla will find other things to do when I take the screens away, she’ll colour or read a book or play with toys, but it’s much tougher with Jay.”

Reynolds says she worries this generation of children are losing their ability to use their imagination or to be creative because of the dependence on screens. “I remember being bored when I was little but I’d go to a friend’s house to play or swim in the pool, I’d be out all afternoon with my friends, coming home only when dinner was ready.
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“But I think parents are too scared to let their kids wander too far on their own these days, and I’ll admit I’m guilty of that too. I’m sure the threats that are around now were around back then but it wasn’t in your face like it is now.

“The kids have plenty to do in the backyard, we have a netted trampoline, a pool and have had cubbies, slip ‘n’ slides and totem tennis, but they lose interest after a while.
“I can see ... how boredom can lead to kids finding more creative things to do. But I do think technology has reduced their interest in other simpler activities.”

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“The year is going so quickly,” remarked my daughter. I couldn’t disagree with her, but still, I was shocked by the words coming out of her mouth. She’s ten for heaven’s sake!
Childhood is supposed to feel like it stretches on forever. The gap between the two Annual Chocolate Festivals (aka Easter and Christmas) used to feel interminable.  

Children are now lamenting the speed of time.  But now my daughter tells me last Christmas feels like yesterday. Is her childhood being ruined? Lamenting the speed of time was only supposed to happen when you got old. It turns out, it’s not just my daughter who is concerned about the perception of time. According to educational and developmental psychologist Deborah Jepsen from Melbourne Child Psychology & School Psychology Services, even if you haven’t heard your child express it directly, they still could be feeling it. 

“Kids will express it by saying how quickly the term has gone, or say, ‘It’s already the end of term!’ ” Jepsen says. Scientists have advanced a number of reasons for the perception that life is speeding up. These include the slowing of our “internal clocks” like metabolism and heart rate as we age, which makes time seem to go faster, or a reduction in the amount of information our brains process in later years.

These theories about ageing and the perception of time make me feel like I’m on the express route to a nursing home. I’m 43 and it feels like we should still be in April. But what does it say about our kids and the world we have created for them? We can’t blame this one on genes and biology.

Georgina Manning, director of Wellbeing For Kids says that children are feeling as though their lives are very rushed, and rushing adds to the perception that time is speeding up. “Children are often being rushed from one thing to the next without any down time to just 'be' and slow down and live in the moment,” she says.

“Rather than ‘being’, children are often in 'doing mode', moving from one task to the next, often on autopilot, creating a sense of urgency which can trigger children’s stress response. '

“Being hurried from one activity to the next each day, without this essential time for play must be exhausting and overstimulating with no time left to process the day, reflect and make sense of our day's experiences,” Manning says.

In addition to over-scheduling our kids, Sophi Bruce from The School of Life blames the sense some children feel of time rushing by on overstimulating and overloading our kids with too much information from devices, and constant interruptions from online messages, adverts, banners, and likes.

“As children’s brains are being stimulated at a quicker rate, their brain becomes used to being stimulated but can’t actually handle the level of information so it is in a greater cycle of trying to catch up,” Bruce says.

Does it actually matter that our kids feel like time is flying by them? There's no doubt that a large part of my shock in hearing my daughter’s comments came from nostalgia for my own childhood and the “good old days”. As a parent you wonder do we really have to add our children’s perception of time to our long lists of things we have to worry about?

According to Bruce, we would benefit from putting down our own generational lenses on time and letting go of comparing our childhoods to that of our children’s. But if the pace of life is having negative consequences on our children’s wellbeing then we shouldn’t ignore it.

“It’s problematic if children display signs of stress or withdrawal due to feeling overwhelmed or have negative perceptions of themselves in terms of what they can’t achieve (a distorted sense of time gives us a distorted sense of success),” says Bruce.

Psychologist Jepsen suggests parents dial back the scheduling and planning and try to spend a little more time enjoying the ‘now’. “If we focus too much on the next step, the next term, the next event we can create anxiety in our kids by overthinking,” she says.

Bruce suggests parents think about the lessons they are teaching their children about time through their own behaviour and language. Constantly telling kids "there’s not enough time", "we’re late", and "we haven’t got all day" sends the message to our kids that life is moving too fast.

One answer might be found in our own childhood: long stretches of boredom where our parents did not feel compelled to entertain us, improve us, or pay other adults to cram as much knowledge and skills into us as possible were common for many of us. “Boredom slows down time and opens up opportunity for creativity,” Bruce says.

It seems counter intuitive in these times of uber-competitive education, status anxiety, and the frenzy of tutoring and extracurricular activities, but what our kids actually need from us is less, not more.
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Kasey Edwards is the author of the children's series The Chess Raven Chronicles under the pen name Violet Grace.