187: What to do when my child says: “I’m booored!”?

Hi everyone, I am Denise, a longtime listener of Your Parenting Mojo. I love this podcast because it condenses all the scientific research on child development, comparisons with anthropological studies, and puts it into context of how I can apply all of this to my daily parenting. Jen has a wealth of resources here. So, if you're new to the podcast, I suggest you scroll through all her episodes, I'm sure you'll find one that will help you with whatever you're going through, or one that just piques your interest. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons your child isn't listening to you - And what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. Enjoy the show.

In this episode, we'll look at some of the history of thinking on boredom and the challenges it can create in our lives, as well as some of the valuable functions it can have, if we can learn how to use it. I will say that I did not intend for this to be an episode that's about school. But it seems like researchers can't use the word "boredom" and the word "children" in the same paper without also using the word "school," so we are going to spend some time on that topic. We may find that understanding more about boredom and how we cope with it helps us parents to live more fulfilled lives as well as our children. So let's dig in.

Almost all of the recent research on boredom begins by mentioning Dr. Peter Toohey's book Boredom: A Lively History, so I'm going to do that too. As we've come to expect on the show Dr. Toohey tells us that there are multiple ways that the word "boredom" is defined by different philosophers and researchers. And these tend to fall within two main buckets - the first form is that boredom is the result of predictable circumstances that are very hard to escape. This is characterized by lengthy duration predictability, and inescapability, which seems to slow time down so you aren't even there. But you're standing outside of yourself watching yourself have this boring experience. And I do want to say now that the vast majority of research on boredom is conducted on adults and specifically on Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic or weird college undergraduates. And again, while I did not go looking for this because I was specifically looking for research on children being bored during the summer, the vast majority of the research on children of boredom does look at their boredom in school.

So this simple boredom has become associated with childishness in adults minds and is looked down on by adults. Dr. Toohey wonders whether it's this stigma that gave rise to the second form of boredom, that sometimes called complex or existential, and which seems to infect a person's very existence, it's very difficult to define it seems to encompass ideas related to melancholia, depression, and we world weariness, existentialist despair and so on. Well, most of the academic research seems to be done on the first kind of boredom, probably because it's easier to conceptualize and measure, most of the BOOKS on boredom are on the second kind.

And of course, all of this history is very much a Euro-centric history of boredom. Unfortunately, there's very little research available from indigenous scholars on the topic of boredom. The only work I can find is published by White researchers who studied with indigenous people. Dr. Yasmine Musharbash did doctoral research in the Aboriginal wealth resettlement of Yoondemu. And while there are words in the local language (which is also called Warlpiri) for adjacent concepts like disinterest in a specific activity, and tired or exhausted in a physical sense, there is no word that directly translates to boredom, which leads Dr. Musharbash to conclude that boredom in pre-contact Warlpiri life was experienced less than it is today, if at all, Eurocentric researchers have described boredom as an experience of having plenty of nothing. It's a failure to engage to make a connection with a thing or an activity; it's a lack of vital interest in events or engagements."

So let's return for now to our definition of boredom and expand on that to what causes it. It's possible that this is linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is the reward system of the brain and has been linked to emotions like joy and excitement. It triggers a response in human brains that in a sense IS these emotions. There's a fascinating line of research connecting boredom with the hyperactivity of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. Children with ADHD find periods of inactivity excessively boring, because a lower level of dopamine affects their sense of time. For them minutes pass more slowly, so they feel bored more quickly than people with normal levels of dopamine. Dr. Katya Rubia at King's College, London says that novelty seeking and risk taking helps these children to self-medicate and boost their dopamine levels, which normalizes their time perception and cures the boredom. The stimulant Ritalin does the same thing which helps me to understand something that had never been clear to me, which is why we prescribed stimulants to people who are hyperactive.

So attention is a key component of boredom and matching the level of attention to the task at hand. We typically think of an under stimulating environment as being boring. The experimental evidence has shown that people find overly challenging tasks to be boring as well. It's essentially a mismatch between cognitive demands and mental resources that makes it difficult to maintain attention.

There is a test to understand whether you are prone to boredom or not, and it's appropriately called the Boredom Proneness Scale. The scoring system seems very strange to me; in Dr. Toohey's book, he says to score each question on a scale of 1 to 7, and a high score indicates a high boredom proneness. But some of the questions are obvious mirrors of each other -- for example, "I am good at waiting patiently" and "in situations where I have to wait such as a line or a queue, I get very restless." I don't see how a high score on BOTH of these items can indicate high boredom proneness. I couldn't find the actual scoring mechanism anywhere, although I did have a snicker when I took an online version of the quiz with true-false answers that told me: "You are bored 0% of the time. You're so calm, you tend to sleep through life. Thank you for taking the BPS. For entertainment purposes only." A lot of the questions seem to be more about situations than anything else - I answered "false" to "I am seldom excited about my work," but that's because I have had the good fortune and privilege and I've worked really hard to set up my life, so I can spend my time doing things I really enjoy. But I can imagine a situation where I had less fortune and privilege and where I was in a job that I didn't enjoy, and where I would experience boredom on a much more regular basis. I did put a link to the online Boredom Proneness Scale on the episode page at YourParentingMojo.com/ bored if you would like to check that out for yourself.

Why does it matter if we feel bored? DOES it matter if we feel bored? The research tends to reiterate the same conclusions connecting boredom and negative outcomes over and over again. In the most often cited study, people were willing to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than sit feeling bored. Boredom is linked to harming others as well as oneself as also depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance. There's even research indicating that many people who experienced psychosis come off their medication because the thrill of psychosis is preferable to the boredom that comes with being medicated. Of course, much of the data is correlational. But the research suggests that chronic boredom is a SYMPTOM of low levels of dopamine activity, along with risk-taking and sensation seeking, and an attempt to alleviate boredom. If we're attempting to draw a direct line from people and especially children and young adults expressing boredom and then engaging in risky behavior, we're drawing the wrong conclusion. Boredom is not the cause of pathological behavior. Rather, it's the dopamine imbalance that causes boredom, as well as potentially these other issues.

So young children will move their bodies to try to increase the amount of stimulation to their brain. And we see in children with ADHD and also an adults who suffer from chronic boredom that they will try to break the rules. Rules represent the old and stale and boring sameness, predictability and confinement. Dr. Toohey points out a variety of examples in adults where rule breaking deliberately aims to shock such as avant-gard art and rock'n'roll which stayed staged revolts against the status quo by way of dazzling intense novelty, but which quickly became as predictable as corn niblets. Everything that was initially edgy and cool eventually becomes acceptable. I was just reading this week about a trend of women wearing crop tops in the office, which is something that definitely would not have been acceptable the last time I worked in an office, just as women wearing trousers once wouldn't have been acceptable either. Tattoos used to be a clear simple of a nonconformist attitude. But when middle class White mothers have them, you know, they aren't nonconformist anymore. (And just in case you're wondering, no, I do not have any tattoos, mostly because I'm not a huge fan of being in pain.)

Sex becomes an escape from boredom, and then risky sexual behavior, and then even that becomes boring. And I have to say that all of this reminded me of a Facebook post I saw this morning about a parent who said they were in tears, as they described their children having destroyed things that were important to her; things that were related to her hobbies, spilling large amounts of food on the floor; basically doing every prohibited activity under the sun. And looking at this in the context of the research on boredom, and we can imagine those children in a constant search for stimulation... the stimulation of doing the thing in the first place, and then at the parents who had a huge reaction afterward. The child is exercising their free will to try to get that hit of dopamine and bring an end to the state of boredom, which is an important point that I want to dig into more deeply.

And this is where we start to get into the research on boredom in children, and specifically in school children as we consider boredom that cannot be escaped. There's also a connection to the research on boredom among prisoners, since boredom is a deliberate part of penal punishment. When boredom is induced and prolonged by some form of external trauma, such as being shut up in a cage or denied human stimulus, then they follows either an angry and self destructive reaction or depression. And I'm not quite sure how to square this with the boredom being a correlate of depression rather than a cause, since boredom is never a self-chosen state. It's always a state that's induced from outside, so maybe it's an issue of the degree of trauma that comes with it. Dr. Toohey says, "It's almost as if boredom represents a compromise between these other two dangerous emotional states - a transitional point through which the sufferer travels toward the other extreme. And perhaps this compromise state is a healthy one. Perhaps boredom acts as an early warning system designed to protect against situations which may be dangerous for psychological well being situations which might encourage agitation and anger and depression. Perhaps boredom increases during a repetitive Have unpredictable experience, or in situations of entrapment that it would be in our best interest to escape."

Like school. Perhaps. I'm joking, of course. I'll let Sean Desmond Healy say it for me - he starts by describing the complex history of boredom in the preface to his book Boredom, Self and Culture, and his very second paragraph begins: "Encountering boredom in the first few years of my career in one of its most fertile breeding grounds, the school - more exactly, the classroom. These complexities were not as yet in the least apparent to me." I confess that I had to laugh that even though I was trying to steer away from talking about schools, that the very first book I read on this topic opened with talking about schools, Healy goes on to say that boredom "is often regarded as inevitable, so much so that its occurrence in school is perceived by many adults as a useful part of their preparation for life, and by those same children as a normal and largely unavoidable accompaniment of their days in the classroom."

A series of studies on boredom in school use time sampling data, which means interrupting the person using an electric pager and having the participants note how they're feeling during randomly selected school and non- school activities. Young people who experienced high levels of boredom in school are also likely to experience high levels of boredom outside of school, suggesting the individual dispositions are an important contributor to the boredom experienced in school. The authors of a paper summarizing the studies pointed out that "the elevated rates of boredom among high school dropouts may reflect a more fundamental failure to master the age appropriate skills needed to cope with potentially boredom inducing environments and tasks." A small exploratory study of 34 children and an after school program in New York City found that the seeds of boredom in school can be detected in children as young as seven years of age. Once again, it's possible that boredom is a consequence rather than a cause of school based difficulties. But it seems likely that once a child becomes chronically bored, and perceive school to be the cause of that boredom, the chances of regaining interest in school activities become severely reduced.

So I say that this is one of my favorite papers. And that's really because I find myself nodding along throughout the first half of the paper, agreeing with all of the author's conclusions. And then halfway through, they essentially conclude that the solution to the challenge of bored and unmotivated children is to stop trying to motivate them extrinsically to engage with schoolwork, and somehow enhance their intrinsic motivation. Now, to me, that sort of misses the point of what intrinsic motivation actually is. When we're intrinsically motivated by something we're motivated by the inherent enjoyment of doing the thing. So rather than considering whether the tasks should be changed to be more inherently intrinsically motivating, the author's focus on how to manufacture intrinsic motivation in children to do tasks that would otherwise be uninteresting. They do this through a series of tools that fall under the umbrella of "motivational embellishment," which include providing an appropriate degree of challenge manufacturing curiosity by presenting ideas that are surprising, incongruous, or discrepant from children's existing beliefs, providing the student with a sense of control, and my favorite, using fantasy to create "a source of meaning for students engaged in otherwise personally irrelevant activities." So rather than just ask a student to determine the length of one side of a right triangle, given the lengths of the other two sides, the student might be asked to calculate the difference from point A to point B to be able to advise Captain James T. Kirk on how to set the transponder beam on the Federation Starship Enterprise to pick up the necessary dilithium crystals directly below on the planet surface, given the Kirk knows only the distances of the ship and the crystals from a third point where his scouting party is stopped.

And I have to say that this then reminded me of a paper that I had to write for my own master's degree in education, where my task for my assignment was to say how I would grade students work on a fictitious assignment. I actually dug out my old paper and it's pretty funny to reread. I opened by saying that the activity would be to assist the managers of a local wetland with a plant survey using geographic information systems software. My second paragraph was: The pedagogical strategy is a combination of problem-based and place-based learning. Problem-Based Learning supports students in gaining skills, often at the highest levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy that are applicable to real-life problems. Students do not just solve imaginary problems, (and then I quoted the assignment that I wasSUPPOSED to set for my students: "Imagine that the Governor asked you to develop a plan to manage water in your state...") to have their work graded on a test but participate in actual real-world problem- solving to both learn and apply knowledge, direct their own learning and reflect on it as well. Placed-based learning presents a powerful opportunity for students to become connected with their own history and culture, as well as the histories and culture of people who lived on the land before them. Both approaches are grounded in constructivist and social constructivist theories: they require that students learn both from hands on experiences with real problems and from working with others to solve those problems."

Maybe this is why I didn't get bored during my master's program because I didn't do an assignment that was designed to please the teacher, but instead rejected the teachers assignment and did the assignment I wanted to do. I don't remember what grade I got, but I know I passed the class. So what I did here was in the face of an assignment, I thought was silly, I exerted autonomy over the situation. And I did the assignment I wanted to do. And in my case, it paid off. I think largely because I was one of the first people to go through the program in the format they were running it, and the administrators were actually checking regularly on my work to see what I was up to. And once when I had a teacher who was giving such unclear feedback that I really couldn't understand how to meet it, they stepped in and they had me submit the assignment to another professor who passed me. So I was reasonably sure that I wasn't going to face negative consequences from exerting my autonomy. And I really wanted to be competent, and to learn something I thought was important, rather than something I thought was a waste of time. And I didn't have a strong connection with the teacher.

Now I see that I was weighing the three aspects of self-determination theory that we've discussed before on the show, although not for a while. So these three aspects are autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and conditions that support these three factors, according to self-determination theory, foster the most volitional (meaning that it's chosen through freewill), and high quality forms of motivation for an engagement in activities, leading to enhanced performance, persistence and creativity. And the degree to which that these factors are unsupported or undermined within a social context will have a strong negative impact on wellness in that setting.

So let's look at how these factors show up in school - autonomy in school is almost never supported. It isn't possible for a child to exist within the framework of school and experience actual autonomy, because one of the core principles of school is that someone else decides what the child needs to know and how they should learn it. Children who do well in school get to feel competent. And if they also have a good relationship with the teacher, then they have decent relatedness, too. And that seems to be enough to get through. It was enough for ME to get through school relatively unscathed. But as we've already heard, in this episode, children who are bored in school often don't perform well or get good grades, even if they're just as intelligent as children who do get good grades. And since children who are bored in school often don't get on well with teachers, there goes the relatedness as well. So from this perspective, it really isn't any wonder that children who are bored are truant more often, and drop out at a higher rate than children who aren't bored. When we think back to my master's assignment, we can see that I'm an adult, I was paying to attend the school, so I thought of myself as a client, and basically, as a peer of the teacher. I also knew how to advocate for myself and I was willing to do it. Our children spend most of their time in school being told that the teachers hold the power and it is not okay for children to say that they think an assignment is silly, and that they could learn more from doing a different assignment. So just because this avenue was available for me, doesn't mean it's available for children in school.

Sean Healy says that in school children are: "constantly to be regarded as a depository for facts, is a passive receiver of information as a mere replay system for teacher and adult and to be confronted with the suppose world-already-existing, in which as the current phrase has it, "you'd better believe," must have the cumulative effect of drawing or dragging young people away from the possibility of developing their existential base their selfhood and their self them where the home recognizes and respects these the harm may not be severe or lasting, but where it does not. And the child learns to play the school game, the mask of the pseudoself may become so close fitting as to be virtually irremovable."

He goes on to call this process "training in disjunction," and I did look at what "disjunction" means - it means the lack of connection between two things. Healy says that lessons in subjects in which children aren't interested are lessons in disjunction, because the children become detached from the subject matter. And in an effort to escape from boredom may cost about for some way of escaping the situation. Haley compares the psychic brutalization of the threat of boredom to Bruno Bettelheim description of life in a concentration camp, where prisoners deliberately stopped noticing the brutality of the SS guards because noticing it would just bring the same brutality on yourself. But the temporary not noticing turns into a withering away of these powers and turns people into what he says are "walking corpses who have given us all action as being utterly pointless, then feeling because all feeling was merely painful or dangerous, or both." Healy argues that the hyper boredom that accompanies the withering away of powers of observation isn't necessarily deliberate. And the realisation that traditional classroom setups bring this about prompted some reforms in school. But he thinks that personalized and individualized instruction is a more efficient way of attaining the same goal of absorbing the required information and skills that the authority figure wants to see, as well as obedience to authority.

A generation ago, students in school had a firm sense that whatever they had to go through was intrinsically worthwhile, even if it was dreary and dull. tasteful. And if the student didn't find it to be true and right and desirable, then the fault was in the individual and not in the system. In England, the children who were most likely to find school boring, were allowed to leave school at age 14. When I was in school, 16 was the minimum leaving age now it's 18. And the students who are bored with school are steered towards vocational qualifications and the non-bored students follow an academic path. John Healy points out that none of the other authors he has read seem to notice that supposedly rather insignificant boredom of the classroom can be a direct precursor of the chronic boredom that's so difficult for people to live with. He says, "If what the young are required to do in school is perceived by them as largely if not totally irrelevant and meaningless. But since they're forced to be there as inescapable, they must either rebel against the tedium or dissociate themselves from what is going on to the extent that they can. This dissociation or withdrawal may very well become habitual, and may extend to existence in general, except in the presence of powerful and direct sensory stimulation force or fun."

I also want to address some of the deeper issues that may underline board and particularly in school. Dr. Nora Seebach believes that White children in Australia who say that learning about Aboriginal history is "boring," and German children who say that learning about the Holocaust is 'boring' may actually be trying to protect themselves from the guilt and shame of being indirectly complicit in genocide. And on the flip side, I've been listening to Dr. Nicole Joseph's book Making Black Girls Count, which is about mathematics education for Black girls. Dr. Joseph cites some studies that quote Black girls speaking about their math education, and several girls said they liked math because their teacher didn't yell at them when they got something wrong. Clearly, the bar is very low here. Dr. Joseph says that when a Black girl says she's bored with math, it's entirely possible. This is because she feels the curriculum is irrelevant to her life. She's in an underfunded school with inadequate resources, and may even have a teacher who actively shames her. In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Bell Hooks writes of the excitement that she felt about learning as a young child, before schools were integrated. When the Black teachers in her all-Black school nurtured her intellect in what she calls a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance."

And then she went on to say, "In graduate school, I found that I was often bored in classes. The banking system of education based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that can be deposited, stored and used at a later date did not interest me. I wanted to become a critical thinker. Yet that longing was often seen as a threat to authority. Individual white male students who were seen as exceptional, were often allowed to chart their intellectual journeys, but the rest of us, and particularly those from marginal groups, were always expected to conform and quote, she writes that a fundamental factor in creating exciting learning spaces is that the teacher truly values everyone's prized presence, and that everyone has something valuable to contribute to it. But in classrooms where some children know that their knowledge and experience is not valued, it's not really surprising that children protect themselves from experiencing the shame of rejection, with the less painful experience of boredom.

I do also want to address the fact that many people who are watching this on YouTube, listening to this episode as a podcast, did well in school. I know that a lot of my listeners have bachelor's degrees, many also have master's degrees and PhDs. I have some of those things myself. I did very well in school, I graduated second in my class in high school. But I would say it's actually not because I'm especially smart. I have two skills that I think led to my success - my autism means that I'm very good at pattern recognition, which turns out to be a lot of what's involved in school. In English classes, I would look for themes that pop up in books over and over again, I clearly remember writing an essay on the theme of dogs and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, I would go through the book, underline any mention of dogs, note the different types of incidences when they would appear, like when a character felt angry. And then I would construct an essay connecting the instances into groups, and then linking the groups all together. And I very quickly realized it didn't really matter what you wrote to connect the ideas as long as they did seem connected in some way. And you included lots of quotes from the text.

I got an A in maths because I could see the question on the exam and know the steps I was supposed to take to get the answer. I really had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. But I didn't need to know those things to get the a pattern recognition was the first skill. And the second one was knowing what the teacher wanted to see whether that was reading a syllabus for the duration of a class in college or a single exam question. I knew what a 'good' answer looked like and how to produce it. I never even asked 'why am I doing this?' or 'is this worth knowing?' In many respects, I think the kinds of kids who were the bane of the teachers' existence because they were bored were actually doing a lot more critical thinking than I was. I vividly remember the moment when I learned to think critically when I graduated high school, I was doing a two year program called A-levels that was required before university and one of my A-levels was in Psychology. And one week the teacher described Freud's theory of personality. And I put it in my head. And I said, "But isn't this the complete opposite of what you told us last week when you described Eysenck's theory of personality?" And she said, "Yeah, these are theories. They're all different ideas about what makes up our personalities." And that was the FIRST time at age 17, when I realized that I didn't have to take what the teacher said as gospel. Because I was good at doing things the teachers wanted to see. And I wasn't doing enough critical thinking to think about how the things I was doing relevant to my everyday life. For the most part, that was what the teachers wanted. As long as I could remember lots of things which I was good at and recite them in the approved ways I would be rewarded. And I was.

Now I do want to reiterate that I really, really, really did not intend for this episode to be about school. But here we are, because this is where the research has led us. So if you're seeing that your child is bored in school, or even that they're doing well, but you can see that they're being motivated by carrots and sticks, and they're losing the intrinsic love of learning that they used to have, then I would love to see you in my Learning Membership, which opens for enrollment on Sunday, July 30. I know that for some of you, that's still in the middle of summer, but here in California some schools go back as early as August 15. The membership is designed to help you support your child's intrinsic love of learning whether your child is in school or not. We cover one module per month in your first year, starting with understanding how children learn and during your first learning exploration with them, which is where you follow a topic of their interest, and act as their guide on the side who connects them with resources. Instead of the sage on the stage who is trying to teach them something, we look at ways to find inspiration in nature, how to scaffold their learning effectively, how to record what they're learning to remind them of their learning journey, and also to give you the confidence that you really can support them. We look at critical thinking and metacognitive learning and five more topics in that first year. We have some families in the membership who are homeschooling and the self-directed work based on what the parents learned in the Learning Membership forms the backbone of their children's learning. We have other families who are committed to school because they don't have another option or because they want to be in school. And they also see that their child's intrinsic love of learning isn't fully supported in school.

Parents often wonder how long all of this will take. Well, you could spend an hour a month looking at the content and 90 minutes a month on a group coaching call with me to get your questions answered. We have an awesome not on Facebook community where you can come and say my child is interested in fire or ants or mud puddles. And I have no idea how to help them extend their learning, and I and all the other parents will help you to find a path forward. And in terms of how long it takes to work with your child on what you're learning, it's entirely up to you. Some families spend most of their homeschooling days on this, while others use these methods only very occasionally, perhaps most use the ideas to lightly extend their children's interests once a week or so on the weekends. It really is entirely up to you and also to your child because it's so much fun learning in this way that you may find they want to do more of it with you. If you'd like to find out more about the Learning Membership and sign up to get a discount coupon for when enrollment opens on Sunday, July 30, you can do that at YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMembership.

So shifting gears a bit here: Is there anything a bored student can do to be less bored in school? One researcher suggests the bored individuals should leverage the components of self-determination theory. So a student can exert more control over monotonous work conditions by adding gamified elements (so something like: "I'll do an hour of homework and then reward myself with 10 minutes of video games"), or reappraising the task to be more meaningful to the individual perhaps by looking for skills they're developing related to persistence, even if the content and the task is boring, compared to students who criticize the teacher, or distract themselves to cope with boredom, students who reappraise the situation and augment the value of the class were less frequently bored, and fared more positively emotionally motivationally and cognitively. This lack of meaning and activities is the other key component of boredom alongside a mismatch of attention.

In experiments, researchers manipulate the amount of meaning in a monotonous task by having people do the task to generate a charitable donation or not. And the task where the person finds more meaning is generally perceived to be less boring. So if students can find some meaning and the larger purpose of being in school as helping them to work toward achieving important personal goals, then they may feel less bored in class.

Competence means finding SOMETHING in the task the student is good at, perhaps by breaking it down into small tasks that are doable, and provide small doses of competence along the way. Relatedness is about the relationship with the teacher and this explains why you might remember a teacher for whom you would have walked through fire and even if you didn't especially like the subject they taught. The relationship carried you through the assignments that you otherwise would have found EXCEPTIONALLY boring. Researchers have also looked at control-oriented self motivating-strategies, so doing things like pushing themselves into starting or continuing activity, but people using these strategies actually showed HIGHER levels of boredom, more physical pain, and were more likely to quit a 100 Kilometer walking tour.

In one fascinating study, researchers worked with eight children aged 8 to 13, over 590 minute sessions, to first explore what children found boring in their daily lives and why, in response to the question, "What was the MOST BORING part of your day?" and "Why?" most children responded school, or specified school related activities like social studies or a math test. When asked why they shared that they disliked having adults tell them what to do, and for how long and a discussion revealed that this power dynamic was really the driver of their boredom, rather than the place or the activities themselves. Where children don't have a sense of being controlled in school like I didn't, they tend to like it. When children see that the adults are controlling them, which is really another way of saying they don't have autonomy, they don't like it and they disengage through boredom. Thinking about activities, many children express the idea that anything can be boring if you do it for too long. And this idea recurred repeatedly in this research. One child said that math was one of his favorite subjects, and he would enjoy doing math for 40 minutes before it gets too boring that a recent math test was two hours long. The children said that anything could get boring if you do it for too long. And the idea that there is a cycle between feeling bored and not bored came up several times. When they were explicitly asked to consider the good parts about being bored, they did come up with some ideas to said that boredom allowed them to think of new ways to entertain themselves, and one said that the time she spends after being bored, is better than time when she's not bored at all. Most of the children's comments suggested that some sort of external stimulus like an activity is the transition from being bored to being not bored.

This also connects to the idea of the VALUE of boredom, and there has been some research on this. Boredom, like all emotions is essentially a source of important information about whether we're productively engaged with our environment. We've already seen how in environments with limited options and where a person's choices are highly constrained. Boredom may not have adaptive functions. To me that says we didn't evolve to be in environments where we lacked choice. But where a person does have options, boredom can be helpful in steering people toward options that have more meaning for them, and that better match their attentional capacities. So boredom, like other emotions serves as an intrinsic motivational system rewarding and encouraging some activities while discouraging others. Boredom is also theorized to help us consider the costs and benefits of an action, and that the opportunity cost of engaging in the current activity may exceed the benefit. In one experiment, people who were asked to think in a room where they were interesting alternative options like a laptop or a puzzle were more bored than people asked to think in an empty room because the opportunity cost was higher.

Because boredom motivates people to seek out up to mentally challenging and meaningful activities, boredom maximises opportunities for learning. Curiosity drives learning progress, but it has a serious limitation. It can't inform a person about prior exposure to similar situations. Boredom can detect repetitive exposure and evaluate known outcomes. So the interplay between curiosity and boredom helps to make learning a dynamic goal directed process that maximizes positive outcomes and minimizes opportunity costs. One way that boredom supports learning is by fostering exploration. People who are bored will seek novel experiences and take risks, especially in environments with little information. Boredom signals that we're coming to the edge have the value of exploiting the same resource over and over again, and that we may benefit from trying something different. Feeling bored is actually linked to better performance on tasks accessing associative and creative thought like coming up with the most uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. People who went through a task designed to induce boredom followed by the cup task identified more uses for the cups than people who went through the cup task before the boredom task. There's also evidence showing that people get something out of being bored if they EXPECT to get something out of being bored. But if they believe boredom is bad, they're more likely to behave in destructive ways. This may even affect researchers who might be predisposed to believe that boredom leads to negative outcomes, and then only look for those negative outcomes.

Nietzsche said that creative people, "require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable, "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful wins. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect upon them." Apparently, Descartes "discovered" the mathematical concept of x and y, which is the basis of graphs while lying in bed staring at a fly crawling around the corner of the ceiling. Einstein is supposed to have achieved is pivotal insight into the nature of relativity while daydreaming about riding a Sunbeam to the edge of the universe. It's well known that many of Einstein's discoveries came during a period when he was a lowly patent clerk. Maybe the dull repetitiveness of his work provided the ideal conditions for his restless mind to wander. I will often go for long bike rides when I'm struggling with a difficult problem because the repetitive nature of the physical activity opens up a different way of thinking than what I can access when I'm not in that state of slightly bored physical exertion. So there's an argument that boredom precedes useful work. But what if boredom itself is useful? Or what if we didn't have to experience it?

All of this leads me to where I want to end up with this episode with two groups of people who really don't seem to experience much boredom. First, I want to return to Dr. Yasmine Musharbash's paper on the Warlpiri people in Australia. The word 'boring' tends to be used among the young people in that community to indicate the inseparability of things in general life, the universe and everything. People will often cruise around all day sleeping one night in one place the next night and another off to one town another, always looking for something to happen. Dr. Musharbash speculates that pre-contact things may have looked very different. The ability to be fully in the here and now has been identified among Australian Aboriginal people, including the belfry as a crucial social trait. She quotes Canadian anthropologist Dr. Sylvie Poirier, who did fieldwork in Australia, and described in her book what happened when a car broke down during a trip, she said: "Far from being concerned or in a hurry to repair it. The friends with whom I was traveling took it as an opportunity to invest themselves in the immediate place where the event occurred. Some wondered about looking for animal tracks or edible plants, while others sat around or gathered firewood. In other words, they established camp. It was as if the breakdown was an occasion to engage themselves with the place and opportunity to feel the place and the moment and see what would happen in that space that time that moment."

Dr. Musharbash also quotes Dr. Wendy Baarda, a linguist who has been living at Yuendumu for over 30 years, who calls the underlying attitude one have "infinite patience, the ability and willingness to be in the moment, wherever one is, no matter what happens, living in the absolute presence." She interprets this as a tension between two basic experiences that certain phenomena of nature repeat themselves, and that life change is irreversible. So we experienced an endless repetition from day to night to day to night, but each day and each night are unique and different from the ones that came before and the ones that will come after. So the wildcards see time, not as a thing waiting to be measured. But as something that is created through the creation of our social life, time isn't an act, but a process. And I have to think that pre-contact this ability to be present was critical to survival. I've never hunted anything, but I've done a fair bit of mushroom hunting over the last few years. And I've noticed that when I'm looking for mushrooms, I very easily drop into a highly present flow state doesn't matter what other big or little things are going on in my life at that point; as my eyes are scanning the forest floor looking for the pattern interruption that signals a mushroom. I'm highly attuned to everything that's physically going on around me in that moment. And I have no experience at living in a culture which passes on traditions orally, but being able to be present for ceremonies and storytelling seems critical to accurately transmitting the rituals to the next generations. In this context, it almost seems like boredom may not exist.

Finally, I wanted to look at boredom through the lens of Buddhism. Dr. Tim Lomas at the University of East London is an English born academic who visited Tibet as a young person became interested in Buddhism and has maintained a somewhat regular meditation practice since then, he notes that it isn't boredom that's problematic, as much as our inability to engage with it or even tolerate it. The problematic behaviors that we observed boredom being linked to earlier in the episode are really our desperate attempt to flee from boredom, rather than problems with boredom itself. We're so uncomfortable being alone with ourselves, and even being truly present with each other, that we will do almost anything to distract ourselves from it.

Dr. Lomas quotes Robert Pirsig's classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of "just sitting" has got to be the world's most boring activity... You don't do anything much: not move not think not care. What could be more boring. Yet, in the very center of this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that you're not seeing?" Buddhist theory says that if you can tolerate and be with the boredom and discomfort, you can gain important insights into your mind and self identity.

I've been practicing mindfulness for a few years now I'm not sure I can claim any incredible insights into my self-identity. And my default state is still to fill every moment with reading. I usually have four or five books on the go around the house, so I have one within reach wherever I am. But over the last few years, I've become a lot more comfortable with doing nothing in particular, and with unproductive time in general. I've worked with parents who can't play with their children because as soon as they sit down on the floor their to-do list comes into their mind and they can't get it out, or they see a cobweb on a shelf and they think about the cleaning that they could be doing right now. And I would have done that too. But now I'm a lot more comfortable being present and not doing those things. I would say that I even have a different relationship with frustration. This morning, I plan to go for a bike ride. But I rearranged my schedule to do that tomorrow because Carys wanted to go to the pool and practice what she has been learning in her swim class, she was really excited. But when we got there, the pool was moderately busy and she clammed up, she was too embarrassed to go in. We sat for a bit, we waited for the transition from family swim to recreational swim, where they give a bit more space to the people who aren't swimming laps. But more people were arriving, and she just couldn't get through it. She sat on my lap outside for a while before we went home. And then I read to her and then she felt better. And she confirmed there was nothing either of us could have done in that moment that could have helped. And we decided to try to go to the pool on weekdays in the future when it isn't so busy.

But a couple of years ago, I would have been REALLY annoyed that she had wasted my time by having me take her down to the pool and back up again and reorganize my schedule for nothing. This morning, I would say I felt very mildly irritated. But that was it. I just saw echoes of how I struggle when there are a lot of people around in an unstructured situation, and how we all have to learn what works for us and what doesn't. And I just didn't feel frustrated. I've seen a similar absence of frustration across a number of situations that I used to find difficult, including boredom. I'm not compelled to reach from my phone to fill every single empty moment anymore.

The grocery store I go to is sort of famous for their long lines. On the Saturdays before Thanksgiving, the checkout lines stretch all the way down the aisles to the back of the store. I don't go on those days anymore... When Carys was little and we used to go together, I started using checkout time to be present with her, we would often play hide and seek behind our hands. Now I usually go alone and on less busy days. But when I'm in line, I don't feel irritated or frustrated, even when I have nothing to do, I find it increasingly easy to just drop inside myself for a few minutes and see how I'm doing. I look for anything that hurts or indicates that something isn't right. And that might lead me to adjust my posture or consider how the bigger issues I'm dealing with are affecting me. Or I really pay attention to what's around me. And I pretty much always notice something that I hadn't noticed before. And I'm not bored. I'm actually kind of at peace with myself. And I certainly don't do this perfectly. But there's a lot more equanimity in my life, which means I don't get thrown around as much as I used to. I do still get stressed about some things, but not as deeply. And I'm able to recenter myself much more effectively now.

So as we wrap up, I want to try to answer the question I imagine you asking, which is, what should I do when my child says they're bored? I think the answer to that is very different based on whether they're in an environment where they have the autonomy to decide their response to their feelings of boredom, if they're in school, where they really don't have much autonomy and CAN'T have much autonomy. This is really about finding autonomy, competence and connectedness in activities to the extent that they can. So maybe they can pick between two activities, which might give them enough of a sense of autonomy, that they can get invested in the activity. Even though picking between two options is really not the same as a real choice. Maybe they can break this down into small parts and experience competence as they complete each part, maybe their relationship with their teacher and are with you is enough to get them to complete the task. So you're helping your child to pull these levers to the extent that they can, while acknowledging that you're operating within a framework that makes it difficult to pull them.

If you're at home with your child, when they announced that they're bored, then that's the huge opportunity, the way our parents would have responded to tell us that they would find us chores to do isn't really the most helpful response. It shouldn't be our responsibility to fix our child's boredom. But I also don't think that response gives them much support in navigating boredom. It also implies that a person should be doing something at all times, whether that's something they choose or a chore. I think that's a big reason why we have such a hard time doing nothing ourselves. Because we've learned that that isn't okay. That's one reason we can never relax. Because if we ever did relax, and express that we were bored, we will be told to go and find something to do. So when our child says, "I'm bored," you could try say saying something like, "Oh, yeah?" in a non judgmental voice. That simply implies that there isn't a problem here. If they persist with: "I'm BORED! I've got nothing to do!" you could offer: "We don't have to do something every moment of every day. It's okay to just do nothing. Sometimes, maybe you'll have an idea soon about what you could do. But if not, you can just see how you're doing. If your body needs anything right now." We can even sit with them. And notice what we see in OUR bodies.

Maybe after our child tells us they're bored. We could watch for a bit and see what they end up doing and ask whether they're enjoying it if they're doing something different from what they normally do. We can observe this and any connection we see between their new creative play and the feeling of boredom that came before it. And we can do this wandering out loud with our child so that they are part of the process.

I do think there's enormous potential to be with our children in their boredom without any sense of needing to change or fix anything. Yijun Lin, a grad student at University of Florida, which is where my husband went to school - Go Gators - observed that Google searches related to boredom doubled in the course of a month when stay at home orders were first instituted during the pandemic. She comments: "Surely it would be adaptive, in such a situation to do so [meaning to be at home] happily and enjoy the extra time afforded by freedom from commuting and overwork. Yet instead newspaper is filled with anecdotal reports of people feeling bored in lockdown.”

And of course, we should acknowledge that not everyone was bored at the beginning of the pandemic. Lots of people were working constantly and risking their lives as they did it. And lots more people were terrified that they would catch COVID because they had risk factors that would have dire consequences if they became infected. Plenty of parents were trying to Zoom school while working from home which was only boredom inducing when you consider the overstimulation sometimes lead to boredom. People who engaged in creative outlets during the pandemic tended to have better mental health outcomes. And these didn't have to be grand creative endeavors. But just everyday activities that convey a sense of what researchers called agency and accomplishment. Perhaps you can hear the synonyms for autonomy and competence, which supported people in the absence of connection when we were social distancing.

What we needed to do is find something that was meaningful for us to do. And we came up short, we were so unused to simply being with ourselves that many of us fell apart. We tried distracting ourselves with the problem of TV and social media. But that only works for so long. Goodness knows, we hope we don't have to go through another pandemic, although so scientists say it's likely that we will. I don't think we should get more comfortable with ourselves in case there's another pandemic. But I think we should try to do it because it might make us and our children more comfortable with ourselves today. Because at the end of the day, being comfortable with ourselves is EVERYTHING.

If what you've heard in this episode has resonated with you and you'd like to join me and all the other parents who are already in the Learning Membership as you discover an amazing new way to support your child's intrinsic love of learning, then I invite you to check out all the details on how the membership works at YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMembership. Enrollment opens on Sunday, July 30. And you can find all of the references and other resources for this episode at YourParentingMojo.com/bored.

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