Boredom isn't the problem. Rescuing kids from it is.

A few weeks ago, I caught myself doing something almost without thinking.

My daughter had reached that familiar moment.

“I’m bored.”

Before she’d even finished the sentence, my brain had started searching for a solution. An activity, a game, a snack, a screen, anything to rescue her from the feeling.

And it made me wonder.

When did boredom become something we thought good parents should fix?

I don’t think this is really about screens. At least, not entirely.

Screens can be incredibly useful. Sometimes you need twenty minutes to cook dinner. Sometimes you’re travelling. Sometimes your child is exhausted. Sometimes, especially if you’re parenting without much support or caring for a neurodivergent child, screens aren’t simply entertainment. They’re a genuinely helpful tool.

This isn’t an argument for never using them. We use them too.

But I do wonder whether we’ve slowly started replacing boredom altogether. And I think children lose something when that happens.

Growing up in the eighties and nineties looked very different.

Our parents loved us. They cared deeply about us. But they weren’t constantly thinking about how to optimise childhood.

If they were busy, they were busy.

If we complained we were bored, the answer usually wasn’t a carefully planned activity. It was something closer to, “Go and find something to do.”

At the time, it felt unimaginative.

Looking back, I think it was one of the greatest gifts they gave us. Because boredom wasn’t the end of play. It was the beginning of it.

Nik still talks about wanting a wrestling ring for his action figures. His family couldn’t simply order one online.

So he made one.

The string net from a bag of oranges became the ropes. Cardboard became the base. It wasn’t perfect. It didn’t matter. It was his. He made it with own hands and solved a problem. He was so happy and still talks about that moment today with pride.

I remember something similar. My family owned a clothing factory, and during the school holidays I’d wander around watching clothes being made. Eventually I wanted my dolls to have their own bedding and clothes.

So I tried to make them myself.

Some attempts were terrible. Some looked nothing like I’d imagined. But I wasn’t trying to produce something perfect.

I was solving a problem.

I wonder how many of those moments began with exactly the same sentence.

“I’m bored.”

Because boredom does something important. It asks children a question.

Now what?

And in answering it, they imagine, experiment, create, negotiate, invent games, build dens, draw maps, turn cardboard boxes into castles. Not because an adult told them to. Because their own minds filled the space.

The challenge today is that boredom rarely lasts very long. Children haven’t changed. Adults have just become very good at removing it, sometimes through organised activities, sometimes by stepping in with ideas of our own, sometimes through a screen that’s always within reach.

Again, I don’t think the screen itself is the problem. It’s that it answers the question before children have had a chance to.

“Now what?”

The answer arrives instantly. There’s no need to invent one.

As teachers, we’ve seen this too. The children who come up with elaborate playground games didn’t learn that from a worksheet. The children who transform a stick into a magic wand, a microphone or a fishing rod aren’t following instructions.

They’re practising something much bigger. They’re learning to think beyond what’s in front of them.

These aren’t subjects we timetable. They’re habits that grow when children have space to use them.

I’m grateful I grew up when I did.

I’m not saying childhood was better back then. In plenty of ways, it wasn’t. There are so many ways life is richer for children today.

But I’m grateful there were long afternoons where nobody entertained me, where boredom wasn’t considered an emergency. Because those empty hours quietly taught me to fill them myself.

Maybe the question isn’t, “How much screen time is too much?”

Maybe it’s, “Are we leaving enough room for boredom?”

Because boredom has always been one of childhood’s greatest teachers.

The trick is learning not to interrupt the lesson too quickly.

If you want the actual phrase we use instead of rescuing her, how long we let it sit, and where we personally draw the line on screens, that’s below.

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