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.

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