What Happens When You Take Kids On Holiday With No Planned Activities
The car engine clicked off at 10 a.m. outside our rented coastal cottage, and my 10-year-old son Leo immediately leaned over the front seat, phone in hand. “Wait, the itinerary map you shared only says ‘arrive’ for today. Did you forget the castle trip? We talked about that,” he said, crumbs from our road trip breakfast bar sticking to the screen. I pulled my bag out of the back seat and admitted it: I didn’t forget. I didn’t plan any activities for the whole week. For the first time ever, we were going on holiday with nothing on the schedule.
For as long as my kids have been old enough for activities, every trip has had a rough spreadsheet: pre-booked tickets, hike start times, dinner reservations, even snack breaks mapped out to avoid meltdowns. This past school year, though, I’d let our schedule at home get just as packed. Leo had SATs practice three times a week, football twice a week, and piano lessons. My 7-year-old daughter Mia had gymnastics, art club, and back-to-back playdates on weekends. Every night at dinner, we’d go over what was coming the next day, and I started noticing a pattern: the second they finished one thing, they’d immediately look up and ask, “What do we do now?” They couldn’t sit for 10 minutes without waiting for someone to tell them what came next. This trip was my quiet experiment: what would happen if we took that away entirely?
The first hour was exactly what I’d feared. They slumped on the cottage couch, scrolled TikTok, and complained in turns that this was the worst holiday we’d ever taken. I’d brought my own book to read, and I just said, “I know it feels weird to not have anything planned right now. I’m just going to sit here and read, you can do whatever you want.” I bit my tongue when Mia sighed loud enough to be heard in the next room, when Leo kept pausing his video to ask if we could at least go get ice cream. I didn’t offer the beach, I didn’t suggest the board game I’d thrown in the suitcase at the last minute. I just stayed out of it.
Forty-five minutes later, Mia yelled from the back step. She’d spotted a common frog in a rain puddle by the garden gate. Leo was off the couch in 10 seconds, both of them forgetting their screens entirely. They poked around the overgrown side garden, found an old shed tucked behind a hedge, and dug out a rusty spade, a cracked plastic bucket, and a frayed length of rope. By the time I asked if they wanted lunch, they’d already decided they needed to dig a permanent pond for the frog, because the puddle would dry up in the sun. They ate their sandwiches standing in the dirt, didn’t want to stop digging to come inside.
Over the next six days, every day unfolded like that. One morning they decided to walk to the beach, not to visit the pier or get ice cream like we usually do, but to collect driftwood to build a little shelter around the pond in case it rained. Another afternoon they hiked the small hill behind the cottage just because they’d stared at it over breakfast and wondered what was at the top. They came back with purple fingers from picking wild blackberries, and insisted on making crumble even when I told them we only had half a bag of sugar. They spilled flour all over the kitchen counter, left berry seeds in the sink, and the crumble was lumpy, but we ate the whole thing anyway. When it rained all day one day, they fought over a deck of cards for 40 minutes, and I almost stepped in to suggest turning on a movie. I kept folding laundry instead, and they sorted it out: they made up their own game about frog explorers and played for two hours.
I’ve heard people say boredom is good for kids for years, but I never actually let it work before. I always jumped in with a suggestion or an activity the second they complained, because I thought if I didn’t fill their time, they’d just stare at screens all day or be miserable. What I learned this week is that it just takes time for their brains to switch out of “wait for someone to tell you what to do” mode. That first hour of boredom isn’t a failure—it’s the transition.
The biggest shift I saw was in Leo, who’s gotten so used to structured activities with rules, scores, and a clear “right way” to do everything that he gets frustrated and quits when things go wrong. Halfway through digging the pond, the side of the hole caved in, and I waited for the huff and the walk away. But this time, there was no coach or teacher expecting a finished pond, no deadline to meet. He just brushed the dirt off his knees, moved the hole a foot over to firmer ground, and started again. No fanfare, no big lesson—just problem solving, on his own terms.
If you want to try this, you don’t need to book a whole week’s holiday to do it. You can start with three hours on a Saturday, leave one afternoon a week blank at home. You don’t need to prep a bunch of fancy activities; just leave a few random, low-stakes things lying around—a bucket, a few old cardboard boxes, a deck of cards—and when they say they’re bored, don’t offer a list of options. Just say, “I know that feels weird right now. I’m doing my own thing, I bet you’ll figure something out.” It’s way harder than it sounds; I had to bite my tongue a dozen times that first day. But it works, if you give it time.
We got home last week, and I didn’t go back to filling every afternoon with activities. I leave one weekday afternoon and most of one weekend day completely blank now. It’s not perfect. Some days they still spend the whole blank period watching YouTube, and I still get that little twinge of worry that they’re wasting time, that they’re missing out on something important. Last weekend, though, they dug a small hole in the corner of our back garden and started their second frog pond. Leo doesn’t ask “what’s next?” every time we finish breakfast anymore. I don’t know if this is going to be some big life-changing shift, but it’s a small change that feels right. We’ll see how it goes.
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