The Lost Art of Boredom: How Screens are Robbing Children of Creativity

Before the backseat was filled with handheld gaming devices, pads, and pods, how did children spend their time in the car?

Give a thought to your childhood, assuming you are old enough to have spent a childhood free from screen time (yes, that was a thing).

My childhood, outside of the car, was spent exploring the neighborhood with kids from across the street. All of us endowed with terrible nicknames such as Freckled Faced Annie and Big Fat Jo, I even hesitate to type them; we did persevere into adulthood despite the occasional ill will of others. However, that did not stop me from having misadventures with a variety of children, including my sibling and his friends, from time to time. We walked to the parks, we walked to school without parents, we walked to the town center — sometimes we walked all the way from our home on Sommer Ave in Maplewood, to the center of downtown South Orange to find better ice cream than the chain offered and purchase board stickers for no real reason (none of us owned a board — we must have liked the graphics). Were the mid to late 80’s that much different for a child than today? Absolutely.

A 14-hour car ride, no screens, just pipe cleaners, yarn, stickers, crayons, and paper.

First of all I don’t believe parents cared as much if children were “bored”, a term I use loosely because the problem is actually a lack of imagination, not boredom. Is it because parents of previous generations just didn’t have the pressures of living up to or the distractions of living on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram? Did they just have experiences in their childhood of more authoritarian models? Without writing a long dissertation on what caused the shift in parenting across the generations, I can anecdotally discuss what has happened based on what I remember experiencing in relations with adults.

They didn’t attempt to fill every moment of silence with an afterschool activity or electronic device — they left us to our own devices, we were termed latchkey kids.

What else filled my time?

Playing with model horses (open ended toys), reading, printing my own magazines (I received a small rubber stamp press in kindergarten), copying the dictionary (yes, I did just share that with the world, and it was my father’s answer to “I have nothing to do”), cooking, horseback riding, pretending to be zoo keepers with my sibling (we’d take turns being a cougar, the game was literally called “coo-gie”), pretending to be royalty (we would drag each other around on a large crocheted afghan early Saturday morning and the “King or Queen”, as the game was aptly named, would demand to be made breakfast or to travel to different places) and once in a while we would watch a television show with our parents, our house favorite was Fraggle Rock.

I assume the choice of the show had something to do with the fact that my father was an engineer at the time, and the whole show was maybe 30 minutes at the most and aired on a premium cable channel, so there were no commercials.

What did our car travel time look like?

There was always the initial barrage of “Are we there yet?”

which would inevitably lead to a discussion of how many Fraggles it would take (this was our measurement of time as young children). We knew we were in for the long haul if it was anything over two Fraggles (possibly Pennsylvania for antiquing — yes, we started at a very young age and were well behaved because it was expected), if it was a half a Fraggle, we could guess where we would be going fairly quickly and accurately, since 15 minutes did not get you very far.

Those longer times were filled with an amazing array of games, many of which we invented on our own, some of which amounted to nothing more than counting as many red cars as we could. My favorite was “chef”. We pretended the ceiling and doors of the car had cabinets filled with endless food supplies, and we would take turns ordering food and cooking it up as — yes, you guessed it, chefs.

There were family games too; such as singing 100 bottles of beer on the wall (and guess what, I grew up to be a teetotaler), singing along to oldies on the radio (lots of folk music, especially Peter, Paul and Mary), playing the license plate game, playing “Going to a picnic”, playing the starting/ending sound game with animals, etc.

We didn’t have any kind of devices, and come to think of it, we were not given loads of “car things” to do either — such as crayons, coloring books, travel board games (we did have one small magnetic chess set, but the pieces always got lost).

Sometimes I took a book with me (which sadly at times got left behind in a hotel room, and then I had to deal with the responsibility of speaking to the librarian; my sibling sometimes brought baseball cards to look at. When those were lost, he learned to be responsible for his own possessions (though he never did get the hang of finding his shoes that were under his bed in the morning).

There were not copious amounts of food or drink in the car (did cars even have drink holders every six inches?), we stopped at rest areas or diners and ate like a family — squashed in a semi-sticky booth or on an ant-infested picnic table.

Does any of this matter?

Yes, because the answer to “we’re bored” or “why aren’t we there now” was never an idevice. It was “play a game with each other,” which really meant, “invent your own fun.”

This is something today’s child is growing less capable of doing, sometimes every single day. Truly pause for a moment and think about the ramifications of a child who cannot invent their own fun, or even sit in silence for 5 minutes (let alone 15). What do you think that child’s future looks like? Can’t imagine that far? Think about what kindergarten in our current education model will be like for a child who needs to be constantly distracted, because that is truly what we are talking about.

Children are experiencing ongoing distraction from being present in the moment. They no longer have the privilege of feeling as though there is nothing to do and then being able to construct something themselves. They lack motivation (devices are given to them at a young age, and I stress given) to use their own minds and even the ability to use their own minds to construct alternative scenarios, games, and interactions. We tout that we want children to become innovators, but the majority of the time, we are not giving them the childhood experiences that will allow them to do so.

I have worked with children for the last 20 years in a variety of capacities, I can attest to this truth. We are ruining childhood for children. What used to be solely about over-scheduling with academic after-school classes and loads of extracurricular activities has now shifted to the deceptively easier and cheaper to manage handheld devices we call pads or pods, and this includes screen time at home that is thought to be “family bonding”.

No longer do parents have to rush children to and fro, or pay for classes — they shove a device in a child’s hand and let them “learn”. The problem is they aren’t learning by doing, and worse yet, they are learning less and less about human communication and contact.

But what about those children who still attend swim lessons or karate?

Adults who are obsessively tied to their handhelds are also part of the problem. Really pause and look around the room next time you are at the pool, the children’s museum or the park. Count how many parents are actively engaged with their child or even engaged with another adult in conversation. It is few and far between, and I know because I did just this while researching the topic of my AMI theory paper on parental engagement.

What do you think of when you see a young child of two or three years, screaming and lamenting that a parent has left the room — that the child is having separation anxiety, misses the parent?

Not these days.

I watched as a child melted down because a parent left the room, briefly, without their phone. Let that truly sink in. The problem was not the missing parent; it was that the phone was forgotten. The young child was trying desperately and earnestly to reunite the parent and phone, which decries the problem — young children have been taught, and rightly believe, that these things are highly important to us. That is the message they take in every day. Sure, they are convenient, and for some, they really can be a tool for work, but the average adult is just distracting themselves from the present moment, too.

What are we losing?

We are losing interactions with the world that have value developmentally. What used to be a time filled with conversations, movement, singing, reading, self-created entertainment, or even simple silence, has now been replaced by sedentary, often isolated, predefined entertainment that usurps the creative process and robs children of the keys to neurological development.