With the end of the school year comes the flood of articles decrying the "overstimulation" of our children and imploring modern parents to embrace the joys of unstructured time for kids during the summer months. "Let them outside to play!" we like to holler at this time of year, and while the sentiment is well-intentioned, it's also an elitist cultural fallacy.
Most parents of young children today grew up in the 1970s and 80s, a time when Canadian kids, outside of school hours, ran freely in the streets, parks and backyards of small towns and big cities, climbing trees, skipping rope and happily tormenting one another free from prying adult eyes. Today however, for a range of cultural reasons, this is no longer the case. You can let your eight-year-old "out to play" this summer, but chances are, if she ventures beyond your property she will have no one to play with and you will be lucky if a well-meaning neighbour doesn't call Social Services if they see her wandering alone in the park.
I'm not saying this is a good thing (obviously it's not), but it is reality. We all talk about "helicopter parents" as if these people are not us – but guess how many of my parent friends would let their first grader walk to the corner store to buy a Popsicle alone? Not one.
The upshot is that when we talk about the "importance of boredom for kids" (Google this phrase and you will get hundreds of results from Huffington Post to BBC News to countless parenting blogs) we are often confusing the freedom of the past with the confinement of today.
For the vast majority of Canadian children, being bored all summer is just that: boring. It means sitting indoors in a hot apartment with no backyard or swimming pool to splash around in, no expensive summer camp to spend long days canoeing on a lake, no glorious summer cottage to while away the days reading on the dock. For most kids, boredom is real and contrary to the "experts" on your social media feed, unstructured hours and empty days are not a magical portal into a nostalgic landscape of summers past. Having no camp, cottage or summer activities planned and paid for means endless hours of screen time because the local library is 10 blocks away and books and movies tickets are expensive. It means cereal poured from a box for breakfast, lunch and dinner while Mom and Dad commute back and forth to work.
I spent a large portion of my own preadolescent summers in a state of sweaty, restless boredom. After my parents divorced my mother moved around a lot, working as a split-shift reporter at local papers in Southern Ontario. When my sister and I went to stay with her, in whatever temporary apartment she happened to be living in, we were often left alone for hours on end with little or nothing to do but watch Three's Company reruns and wait for her to come home from work. Occasionally there would be enough money to go see a movie, but not always. Usually there would be food other than peanut butter and crackers, but not always. There were plenty of books and we devoured them (I remember reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Marilyn French's The Women's Room at the age of 10 and being unable to speak for about a week). My mother did her best as an overworked, overwhelmed single parent but let's just say summertime wasn't a panacea of glorious creative development and I was immensely relieved when school started back up in September.
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once wrote that the "capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child. Boredom is a chance to contemplate life, rather than rushing through it." And while this might be true for privileged kids, the opposite is often true for the idle offspring of stretched working parents.
What we mean when we say our children need to "learn to be bored," is that children need to learn to amuse themselves without structured activity being provided for them. But reading a book or doing a puzzle or even happily gazing at the clouds is not the same as being bored. Boredom, true boredom and inertia, is awful. It's getting past boredom, to a state of independent engagement or flow, that's the real trick. And flow is a learned behaviour – one most kids today pick up from passionate teachers or counsellors and engaged parents who are willing and able to expose them a wide range of skills and opportunities.
As for those summer activities we do organize for our kids – the city art camps, team sports, swimming lessons, music practice, coding school, off-season ski training and overnight nature camps – they are an enormous privilege, afforded to the lucky few and not something to be sneered at. Kids who engage in these activities are more likely to be physically and emotionally healthy as well as socially and academically engaged.
So this summer, please don't tell me my kids would be better off bored at home than busy at camp. As a formerly bored kid I can tell you which is better, and it's the option with tennis, sailing and canoes on a lake. Surprised? You've clearly never spent a summer watching Three's Company reruns.