SCHOOL’S out, the sun is shining and, for five to 16-year-olds, this is the most boring week of the year. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids!
It is at this point of the summer holidays that children are said to reach peak boredom levels. In a study of 1,200 parents of school age children, most said the novelty of the long break wears off just two weeks in.
As a child, six whole weeks of summer, stretched ahead like eternity, was a delicious thing to savour. No school till September! They were great, those long days of playing out and messing about, and not really doing anything in particular. Inevitably, boredom set in, but that didn’t matter. Whingeing about it certainly wasn’t tolerated. “I’m bored!” we’d wail. “I’m Mum. How do you do?” came the nonchalant response. Our mothers didn’t care if we were bored, as long as we were out from under their feet until tea-time.
There seems to be an endless smorgasbord of summer holiday activities for today’s children. Every day I get press releases about nature trails, mini fun runs, face-painting drop-ins, geocaching challenges, eco-crafts workshops - there’s so much ‘family fun’ around now, kids just don’t have time to be bored. And that’s a shame. Because it’s okay to be bored.
Being a child of the Seventies, I had boredom down to a fine art. In the summer we’d spend a couple of weeks or so in a caravan or a tent (with the added boredom of long, hot car journeys) and the rest of our six-week mega-break was largely spent doing what I can only describe as mooching about.
We went to places that the Public Information Films of our childhood warned us not go to. We played near railway lines, by canal locks, along the river, at the sewage works. We climbed over barbed wire and strayed up close to electricity pylons. We wandered into the woods, roller-skated across roads and hung around in places where the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water was likely to be lurking.
“I think we were a bit feral,” I said to my brother recently, when we shared a memory of sneaking into a ‘haunted house’ as infants. We and a bunch of other kids were somewhere we knew we shouldn’t be; somewhere dark, overgrown and a bit gothic. I think, looking back, it was the garden of what seemed at the time to be a spooky old house. I must have only been three, maybe four-years-old - which makes my brother little more than a toddler! It seems incredible that we were allowed to roam the neighbourhood at that age, in a gang of little kids. “Different times,” we shrugged.
I guess the Seventies mothers knew we’d all come home - and we did. Just as they did, when they were kids.
The freedom, and boredom, of those long summer days made us resourceful. I don’t remember any heritage trails, treasure hunts, straw bale mazes or eco-arts workshops. Who needs organised fun when you can just mooch about?
Now, in the high tech age, it’s all about over stimulation. Being bored is frowned upon. Social media is awash with images of people filling their leisure time doing endless stuff. Boredom, for adults, is taboo.
And children aren’t allowed to be bored either. Parents pull their hair out trying to come up with ways of keeping their kids entertained over summer; it all gets very stressful and costly. Summer holiday schedules are packed full of Things to Do. Yet the Child Mind Institute says boredom is good for children, helping them develop life skills, such as tolerance, strategy-planning, problem-solving, organisation, team-work and managing emotions. These are key skills that, says the Institute, children “whose lives are usually highly structured may lack”.
Children should embrace boredom as part of life. It can foster creativity, independence and wellbeing. When we got turfed out in the summer holidays, we worked out how to fill the time; we came up with plans and took ourselves off. We could be bored till the cows came home. I still relish a bit of boredom now and then. In an age when we never really switch off, it’s quite a luxury.
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