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Are your children bored this summer? Good!
Are your children bored this summer? Good!
http://www.sundayherald.com/56827 If your children like to stay in bed until lunchtime, then slouch around saying there's nothing to do - don't worry, it's no bad thing. Joan McFadden explains Sunday Herald - 16 July 2006 A FORTNIGHT into the school holidays, many families have already reached snapping point. The novelty of liberty has worn off, the neighbours' kids are in Florida and the "mum, dad, I'm bored ...." mantra is a more familiar summer soundtrack than the drone of bees. The solution, it's generally assumed, is for well-meaning parents to plan several weeks of torpor-busting activities and day-trips. But should we bother? Dr Richard Ralley, a senior psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Lancashire, is currently conducting research into boredom, with the aim of finding out more about the emotion that children love to whine about, and guilt-ridden parents often respond to by trying to find yet more drama sessions and dance classes to ease their offspring's ennui. Instead, argues Ralley, we might do better to let them be. Like other emotions - such as anger, fear and jealousy - boredom serves a function, and may not always be a bad thing. It may, for instance, be an important device in helping the body conserve energy by resting, or a signal that a particular task isn't worthwhile. It can also aid professional development, by motivating jaded business people to seek out more challenging roles. Bored school pupils should perhaps alert us to the need for a different kind of educational engagement. And during the holidays, parents may do better to leave the kids to their own devices, rather than desperately attempt to keep them busy. "If that means they want to sleep until 1pm every day and then lie on the sofa watching football all evening, then that may be more beneficial for them than having a timetable of activities drawn up to keep them occupied," says Ralley. Children, like adults, need to rest, allowing their brains and bodies to replenish energy supplies in order to deal with everyday challenges. This kind of recuperation can, Ralley suggests, be confused with boredom and listlessness so that, "rather than making the most of it and relaxing, we often try to counter it by doing more energetic activities". Ralley wants to discover the root causes of boredom. "Once this is understood," he explains, "it is much easier to harness boredom in a positive way. Who knows, I may even discover that boredom at home is the body's way of telling children that they are looking forward to going back to school." Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Paranoid Parenting, understands that parents can feel pressured to provide solutions to a child's boredom. But he adds: "Children have to learn to live with themselves and engage with the world around them, and if they are continually expected to work and play in an organised and structured way they won't develop that capacity. "It's challenging and exciting to be bored as a child, but adults look at the emotion from a more sophisticated angle and consider it very negatively, as dead or wasted time." Persistent and sustained listlessness can, however, be symptomatic of problems such as depression, and Paddy O'Donnell, professor of social psychology at Glasgow University, cautions that this possibility needs to be ruled out as a possible factor, rather than ignored. But for the most part, he suggests, feeling fed-up can be construed as nature's way of saying, "find something to do", which is linked to children's natural inclination to play and explore. Up until around the age of three, mothers play an important role in helping children direct their curiosity, and encouraging them to learn to use language to explore the world. Beyond that stage, says O'Donnell, "they are interested in social play, which becomes a major feature of their activities. Middle childhood, from around six to adolescence, covers three particular elements. These are physical activities and shouting a lot, which peaks at eight or nine; role play and pretence; and manipulating the world as they build and create. "Boredom shouldn't last long if children are in the right environment where they're dragged off either by curiosity or the desire to socialise, and should only continue if there's nobody to play with or the environment is too restrictive." In evolutionary terms, the age of five or six has always been a crucial stage, at which youngsters naturally tend to stop spending so much time with their parents, and seek the company of their peers. Children, says O'Donnell, like playing with their own age group and find siblings less interesting, although brothers and sisters will do when there's no alternative - for example, during holidays. Adults who feel morally obliged to spend every waking hour playing with their children and stimulating their imaginations, take note. "Parents," argues O'Donnell, "should not be pals, no matter how much taxiing and entertainment they're willing to provide. Children need to be exposed to a different environment to help them develop and that's not easy as there are fewer and fewer places colonised for play." The literary antecedent of today's earnest, educational goal-oriented parent must be Tom Sawyer's long-suffering Aunt Polly, who fretted constantly about her nephew's preference for idle pursuits, such as playing hookey and mucking around in trees, over constructive activities such as doing chores and getting a decent education. She feared that her inability to make him knuckle down was "laying up sin and suffering for us both" in the future. Aunt Polly's abhorrence of idleness typifies the old Calvinistic conviction that "the Devil makes work for idle hands" - a mindset which seems to persist among many contemporary parents, who harbour a nameless, but morbid dread about the consequences for Chloe or Ethan's future wellbeing, should their time not be permanently occupied with gymnastics classes or supervised creative sessions with glue-stick and dried macaroni. Sawyer, of course, desires nothing more than his freedom, and when his aunt forces him to whitewash a fence one sunny morning, he uses his wits to secure "a nice, good, idle time" for himself, sitting around watching his friends do all the work. The celebrated rapscallion understood the value of doing nothing and his favourite pastimes - fishing, playing pirates, building rafts and getting up to mischief - now seem redolent of a lost idyll, in which long hot summers were filled with the kind of pursuits that owed nothing to careful parental organisation, and everything to the imagination of a child left alone, unsupervised, and free to dream up their own solutions to the problem of boredom. The idea that escape and creation are vital to development is what inspired brothers Conn and Hag Iggulden to write their bestseller, The Dangerous Book For Boys, having always felt let down by the fact that no such guide existed when they were children. As a father, says Conn Iggulden, "I want my children to have the sort of childhood we did. Of course, you don't want a kid to walk up to an unexploded firework but as far as we're concerned, the only really dangerous thing is ignorance." The resulting tome combines encyclo-paedic information on everything from scientific curios to famous adventurers, with "how-to" guides to the kind of pastimes popular before childhood was targeted as one long opportunity for "learning through play". These include building treehouses, making go-carts and even eyebrow-raising pursuits such as playing with catapults or bows-and-arrows, and hunting rabbits. In 1918, DH Lawrence wrote: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning." Almost a century on, perhaps it's time parents learned to embrace the benefits of benign neglect - even if only for short periods of time. By wrestling the computer console from a child's grasp and letting them loose on an empty beach or a television-less room, parents who are used to driving their offspring everywhere may discover that when it comes to journeying into their own imagination, children are best left to travel solo. |
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Are your children bored this summer? Good!
In article .com,
"Fred Goodwin, CMA" wrote: A FORTNIGHT into the school holidays, many families have already reached snapping point. The novelty of liberty has worn off, the neighbours' kids are in Florida and the "mum, dad, I'm bored ..." mantra is a more familiar summer soundtrack than the drone of bees. The solution, it's generally assumed, is for well-meaning parents to plan several weeks of torpor-busting activities and day-trips. But should we bother? The solution according to whom? My solution to whining about boredom was the same as my mothers: to find something for them to do, like scrubbing a floor or washing windows or cleaning a closet. I might START by pointing out the bookshelf, a tree that needed climbing, or something else -- but I would just not tolerate whining about being bored. (Nor would I allow them to turn on the TV as a solution.) And there were always craft materials and books and writing materials and music books and decks of cards and board games (and siblings) around. Now, if the kids asked to do specific things, then we'd discuss it -- but I never considered one of my jobs to be to see to it that they were never bored. Any parent who is terrified of their kids being bored is just setting themselves up for failure, and WAY too much work! Sure, we can plan things we think the kids will enjoy. Heck, I STILL do that, and my kids are grownups. And we can enroll them in activities, for some of their time. But none of the parents *I* know feel the concern this article seems to think is universal to keep our kids from being bored! -- Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care |
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