I just read a short piece that left my jaw hanging. Fortunately or not, my fingers are still functional. In last Sunday’s USA Weekend, Ann Pleshette Murphy cites a survey where many kids report stress because they have “too much to do,” and then mentions research which finds that boredom “produces brainwaves associated with creativity.” Oh! Boredom is good for my kids’ brainpower! How can I give them the brain benefits of boredom? Here are some selections from her answer:

…enforcing boredom…. Make downtime a scheduled family activity…. When your child says, “There’s nothing to do,” don’t rush to fill the void. Provide art supplies… give older ones a journal or tape recorder to chronicle their thoughts.

Italics are mine. For my careful readers, I have to add: I didn’t forget the ellipsis: There’s nothing between “don’t rush to fill the void.” and “Provide.”

By coincidence, I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s latest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, about his childhood in the fifties:

Because days were so long and so little occurred, you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things on the off chance that something diverting might occur…. Other long periods of the day were devoted to just seeing what would happen – what would happen if you….

It isn’t just that USA Weekend gets it so wrong. It’s as though they can’t conceive the setting conditions for true boredom: that a child could have nothing to do, that a parent would not leap to the rescue, that children could be left completely to their own devices. (At my most cynical, I think staring into space, without so much as a tape recorder to chronicle the busy content of the idle moment, was seen to be a distressing consumer behavior, to be extirpated.)

In Grow With the Flow, I use the old phrase “to invite the soul” to talk about the private, apparently empty times in which our minds wander where they will. I suspect kids do this best when they have “nothing to do.”

I wouldn’t want this post to be about The Good Olde Days. You know from GWTF that I’m an activist for action with our kids; the idea that we influence their development is central to the book. But you also know that I bemoan the potential loss of balance in this – the fear-based sense that we must make certain no minute of our child’s formative years goes unmanaged.

Things have changed a bit since 1956. I don’t know what boredom looks like in the midst of bombarding stimulation. (Maybe just the same as always?) I don’t even know that occasional boredom is fruitful, although my intuition says it is. But I do know you don’t help your kids to fruitful boredom by finding something for them to do.

I’ve set up a Coffee Table, What Should Parents Do? in case anyone would like to talk about the appropriate extent of parent involvement in their child’s day-to-day development. Should we sometimes back off? Or is that just a cheap way to avoid responsibility? Has the world changed so much that benign neglect isn’t benign? Or can our level of involvement interfere with basic developmental needs?

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