The good and bad of kids’ boredom
Adults can teach children how to manage boredom
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The quintessential complaint heard by parents of young children is simple yet maddening: “I’m bored!” Our instinct might be to solve the problem by listing a menu of possibilities. Or perhaps we preemptively pack their schedules full of activities to avoid hearing those dreaded words.
“Every parent you talk to has the same reaction. We’ve got this propensity to fill the space and give them something to do,” says Michelle Kennedy, a youth mental health researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. “Boredom is often seen only as a negative emotion, and we have to reframe that.”
“Boredom is often seen only as a negative emotion, and we have to reframe that.”
Michelle Kennedy
Compared to other negative emotions, like fear and anger, boredom is remarkably understudied in psychological research, particularly in young children. But in the last decade, researchers have started to understand its origin and effects. When we feel dissatisfied because the environment is not challenging or interesting enough, we have trouble paying attention and finding meaning in what we are doing.
“Like all emotions, boredom has a function, and it’s absolutely important to experience it in order to navigate the world successfully,” says McWelling Todman, Professor of Clinical Practice at The New School for Social Research in New York. “So, boredom in and of itself is agnostic with respect to whether it’s good or bad. It’s basically a tool that we use to determine whether or not the amount of time and attentional resources we’re investing in a particular task is worth the effort.”
The development of boredom through childhood
While the majority of 4-year-olds in a 2019 study understood the meaning of love, scared, excited, and angry, only about a third could define bored. But nearly all the 7-year-olds understood — and older children and adolescents tend to experience it more often.
“While the majority of 4-year-olds in a 2019 study understood the meaning of love, scared, excited, and angry, only about a third could define bored.”
“You’ll find that children from zero to five are brilliant at pretend play, and they’re never bored. Then, all of a sudden, we have this situation in primary school where they’re starting to lose that creative play,” says Kennedy. “There’s this realization of, ‘Maybe my friends are going to ostracize me and think I’m babyish.’”
Children cease pretend play on average around age 11. They often say they grew out of it, found it embarrassing, or noticed that others around them had changed. Coincidentally, children start to feel more bored during free time at the same age. A group of 722 children reported feeling more bored as they grew older, from age 10 to 14.
“Boredom tends to rise in the teenage years, hitting a peak around 16 or 17,” says James Danckert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Children in their late tweens and early teens are getting their first taste of adult-level skills and experiences, but at the same time, are still constrained by their parents and society.” Teenagers are therefore more susceptible to boredom because they can’t always exert their agency.
Once we reach adulthood and embrace the newfound freedom it affords, boredom usually starts to release some of its grip. Chronic boredom – called “trait boredom” by psychologists – is associated with negative outcomes like substance use, risky sexual behavior, and poor academic performance in adolescents, and anxiety and depression in adults. But more fleeting feelings of boredom, or “state boredom,” are not necessarily bad and can even have inherent value.
“Much like how pain motivates action to find relief, state boredom pushes us to seek out more fulfilling opportunities.”
Some experts argue that, much like how pain motivates action to find relief, state boredom pushes us to seek out more fulfilling opportunities when old ones are no longer satisfactory. As a negative and aversive experience, it can provide a valuable adaptive function by signaling to a person that it is time to pursue a new goal. In addition, being bored may lead to increased creativity in certain tasks.
Helping children cope with boredom
Boredom alone, however, is not enough to produce benefits. It influences decision-making by motivating a preference for novel stimuli, which can include risky or harmful situations. Danckert believes that trait boredom – and all the negative outcomes associated with it – arises from a chronic failure to respond successfully to the self-regulatory signal of state boredom.
“One of the things that has been said in the popular media for the last decade or so is that children need to learn how to be bored more,” says Danckert. “What we’re trying to say is that we want our children to cope better with state boredom.”
“The experience of state boredom in first-year students at upper secondary school is strongly associated with intentions to quit school.”
For instance, the experience of state boredom in first-year students at upper secondary school is strongly associated with intentions to quit school. The seeds for such an outcome may be planted in children as young as 7, according to Todman’s research. In a small group of 7- to 10-year-olds, children who reported being more bored tended to have lower academic performance, particularly in reading.
“At a very early age, we could predict to some extent how well somebody was adapting to the school environments or learning environment based on their self-reports of boredom,” he says.
Parents, teachers, and other caregivers can teach healthy boredom-coping skills to try to mitigate or avoid the later potential negative outcomes of boredom. In general, coping skills that involve solving rather than avoiding the problem are more beneficial.
Positive reappraisal — thinking differently to change one’s perception of a situation — is linked to lower levels of boredom in students, along with higher academic achievement and more motivation. On the other hand, chatting with friends or secretly looking at one’s phone during class are examples of avoidance-oriented coping.
“Positive reappraisal — thinking differently to change one’s perception of a situation — is linked to lower levels of boredom in students.”
“Through guidance and support from adults, kids can develop the self-control that’s needed to respond to boredom in adaptive as opposed to maladaptive ways,” Todman says. “That would be the educational prescription that I would advocate for, where kids are educated very early on about what boredom is and its potential costs.”
For instance, parents whose young children complain of being bored on a rainy day can help reframe the situation by having them come up with a list of possible things to do. Rather than solving the problem for them, such an approach teaches children how to use their agency to craft their own solutions, while also opening their eyes to the opportunities of a traditionally boring situation.
“As parents, it’s about retraining ourselves to move away from this obsession of filling that space,” says Kennedy. “I see children being bored as a way to develop their ability to seize upon an opportunity, grab an emotion that’s perceived by society as negative, and essentially push through it.”
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