Nursery World - Learning & Development: Boredom

In seeking to ensure children are always busy, have we overlooked
the value of simply doing nothing? Dr Natasha Kirkham considers the
issue.

I'm bored. I'm BORED!' my youngest son shrieks, and immediately leaps in with, 'There's nothing to do!' The older two nod in agreement. It is a refrain that will be familiar to many parents.

However, at the risk of sounding cruel, I truly believe that the response to such wails should be, 'I don't care.' You can, of course, provide a nicer version of that. But what is wrong with being bored? In fact, let us turn the question around and ask ourselves, 'Is there something wrong with being constantly engaged?'

In this era of screen time and over-scheduling, the modern child has relatively little time to just do nothing. I am not talking about sepia-coloured memories of times past when children ran free through fields, playing games of imagination from dawn to dusk. I am talking about a time when there wasn't 24-hour access to information, to immediate gratification. This is new. This was not part of our childhoods, and as practitioners, parents and researchers, we need to figure out what is enough and what is too much.

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