Boredom is Okay
In the 1970’s summer vacation meant: staying up late, sleeping late, beach bumming, Bible camp, and eating ice cream…lots and lots of ice cream. If we were bored, our mothers would offer us plenty of chores or look over their cat-eyed frames with one raised eyebrow and say, “And what are you gonna do about it?”
So what did we do when we got bored and we’d watched enough reruns of The Brady Bunch, Leave it to Beaver, Captain Kangaroo, and all the Looney Tunes Cartoons you could stomach?
We played.
That’s right. We played unorganized games with neighborhood kids like us; sometimes made-up games with silly names and rules that changed. We pool-hopped around the neighborhood, rode bikes to the corner store for ice cream, candy and soda (fully loaded with sugar), played school and house, colored, painted with water colors, drew pictures, read books, and of course we did our household chores.
As teenagers, we spent days and nights at our best friends’ houses, took drivers ed classes and drove our friends to the beach as often as we could afford the gas and our work schedule permitted.
That’s right, we also worked. We worked wherever we could find a job—the local grocery store, department store, fast-food restaurant. Work was a right-of-passage at sixteen. It meant we were gaining independence from our parents, earning adult money and taking on adult responsibility.
I passed this training-out-of-boredom onto my children. Early on they learned that boredom is okay. I was not responsible to fill up their boredom hours, they were. They used their imaginations and abilities to fill their lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer as was fitting and according to parental boundaries.
Melissa Fenton, modern mother of boys and writer at 4boysMother wrote about lazy summers in a recent blog and I loved what she said:
Why all this new-found love and nostalgia over having a do-nothing summer? Because honestly, we’re tired. Because we foolishly think by doing more, by going and going, and going, by throwing our kids into everything everywhere this summer and answering “We’ve been really busy!” to the question, “How has your summer been?” makes us a better parent. It doesn’t. Deep down, it’s just exhausting, both for the parents and the kids.
And, how will our every-minute-scheduled-kids react? Melissa writes:
Days will go by with nowhere to be, nothing on a schedule, and nothing to do. At first, they will moan and complain and curse the uneventful days.
And then something extraordinary will happen. They will slowly unwind, downshift so to speak, and embrace the un-busy. And it won’t actually be painful, rather the boredom and stillness will become a blessing.
Yeah, that’s it! When we slow down enough to catch our breath, when we allow time for nothing but space and embrace the “un-busy”, it becomes a blessing. Not only do we allow our imaginations room to explore the world, but we allow our hearts (and our kids’ hearts) room to listen and hear God speak. What better way to train our children to hear from God than to give them the space—the un-busy times—to practice hearing?
With only a few precious weeks left to Summer 2015, why not consider doing nothing? Boredom is okay. You never know, after a few days, your kids might surprise you with what they discover they can do!