I’m a Teacher and a Parent: My Hot Take Is That Kids Need More Boredom, Not Less
At 3:05 on a Tuesday, my son dropped his backpack by the front door and announced, “I’m bored.”
He had been out of school for roughly four minutes. I had just walked in from work, still carrying my laptop bag and a half-empty water bottle. My first instinct was to solve him. I opened my mouth, ready to list every option: Legos, drawing, the trampoline, a snack, a playdate with the neighbor kid.
I caught myself. That list was more for me than for him. I didn’t want to deal with the restlessness. I wanted to move on to making dinner, checking email, unloading the dishwasher. So I said something I almost never say on a weekday afternoon: “Okay.”
He looked at me. I looked at him.
“Yeah, I’m bored. So what am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ll figure it out.”
He stood in the hallway for a minute. Then he dragged his feet into the living room. He flopped onto the couch. He groaned. I went into the kitchen and made tea. For about five minutes, nothing happened. I could hear him sighing dramatically, the way only a nine-year-old can. But I didn’t go in.
Eventually, he pulled our recycling bin onto the kitchen floor and asked if he could have some tape. There was no grand creative project. He just built a weird cardboard ramp for his toy cars and then abandoned it halfway through. But he was occupied. He wasn’t glued to a screen. And he’d solved the problem himself.
That afternoon made me think about how often we, parents and teachers, treat boredom like a failure. Maybe that’s my hot take: we are way too afraid of letting children sit in the discomfort of having absolutely nothing to do.
As a teacher, I see the same pattern in my classroom. When a student finishes an assignment early, the first thing they usually say is, “I’m done. What do I do now?” And my default is to hand them another paper, or tell them to read, or assign a quiet task so I can keep working with the group in front of me. That’s practical. It keeps the class moving. But it also sends a quiet message: your time is not yours; someone else should always be filling it.
One day, after finishing a math worksheet, a girl asked me that exact question. Before I could hand her another one, I paused. “What do you think would be a good thing to do?” I asked.
She shrugged. She looked at the ceiling. She started drawing in the corner of her notebook. It wasn’t anything special. But she made a choice. She practiced being the person who decides what comes next.
That’s a skill we don’t name very often. But it’s a huge part of learning. When a child has to wait, or wander, or sit with the question, they’re developing something that’s not on any report card: the ability to tolerate open space.
We talk a lot about keeping kids engaged. We think engagement means constant stimulation. But real learning isn’t always active. Sometimes it looks like a kid staring out the window during independent reading. Sometimes it looks like a kid doodling instead of writing an answer. Sometimes it looks like a kid wandering around the backyard with no plan. Those moments are not wasted time. They’re where kids practice deciding what to do with themselves.
I’m not saying we should ignore our kids or leave them to figure everything out alone. I’m saying the reflex to fill every empty moment is worth questioning.
There’s a particular phrase I use now, at home and in the classroom. When my son says he’s bored, I say, “I trust you to find something.” It sounds small, but it’s a shift. Instead of giving him a fix or a list of activities, I hand the problem back to him. It works better when I also offer a little structure, like “screen time starts at four o’clock” or “you can stay in your room or the living room.” That gives him boundaries, but not instructions.
At school, if a student finishes early and asks what to do, I try to ask instead of assign: “What’s your plan?” If they don’t have one, I let them sit with that blank space for a minute. I don’t rescue them right away. If they still can’t think of anything, I’ll point to a few options: read, draw, write a note to a friend, reorganize their folder. But I name the options out loud and let them pick.
I also try to keep a few open-ended supplies available, like blank paper, old markers, scrap cardboard, and a roll of masking tape. It doesn’t have to be Pinterest-worthy. Just materials that don’t come with instructions. That’s been more useful than any fancy activity bin I’ve bought.
But I want to be honest: this is uncomfortable. When a child says “I’m bored” for the twentieth minute and you still have dishes to do, the urge to hand over a tablet is strong. And I’m not here to pretend that I’ve somehow solved that. Some days, I give in. Some days, the screen saves us all. That’s normal.
The point isn’t to turn every kid into a self-directed little genius. The point is to make space for boredom often enough that it doesn’t feel like a crisis.
Because when we always fill the pause, we teach kids to be afraid of it. They start to believe that every empty moment is a problem to be solved. They reach for a device or ask for another task. They don’t trust their own ability to come up with an idea. And that’s a shame. Because a lot of real thinking begins in those awkward, unproductive minutes.
My hot take is not that boredom is magical. It isn’t. It’s messy. It looks like a lot of staring at walls and complaining. But it’s a normal part of growing a brain that can eventually handle long stretches of ordinary time, the kind of time where nothing is presented to you on a screen or a worksheet.
Since that first Tuesday, I’ve started doing less. I make tea. I let him be restless. Sometimes he still just stands there and I have to fight the urge to suggest something helpful. I don’t know if he’s learning something grand every time. Some afternoons are simply dull. But I’m learning to wait a little longer before I rescue him. And he’s learning that boredom isn’t an emergency.
He still tells me he’s bored almost every day. I don’t expect that to stop. But now, when he says it, I usually say, “I trust you to find something.” And sometimes, eventually, he does.
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