I noticed something small the other morning. I was standing in my kitchen waiting for the kettle, and within about three seconds my hand was already in my pocket, looking for my phone. The kettle is not a long wait. There was nothing I needed to check. The reach was just there, automatic, the way you’d scratch an itch.
I did not do this as a kid. Not because I had more patience, but because the option to fill the wait was not in my pocket. You stood at the kettle and were vaguely bored for a minute and then the kettle clicked. A question I’ve been asking lately is: was I better for it?
Perhaps the most-cited recent piece of research on this topic comes from psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire. In a 2014 study with her colleague Rebekah Cadman, Mann had participants do a deliberately boring task — copying numbers out of a phone book — and then come up with creative uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. In one part of the study, the bored group produced more ideas than a control group that had skipped the boring bit.
Mann puts her view simply: “Unlike so many parents today, I am quite happy when my kids whine that they are bored. Finding ways to amuse themselves is an important skill.”
A separate line of work, run out of Jonathan Schooler’s lab at UC Santa Barbara, tracks something related — what happens when the mind is allowed to wander. In a study, working writers and physicists logged their best ideas, and about twenty percent of them showed up not at the desk but while doing something else, when the mind had room to drift. Schooler’s read on the modern version of this is direct: “We’re always trying to fill every moment of our time with cell phones and not giving our minds the opportunity to just wander off. That may interfere with the opportunity to have these moments of productive mind-wandering.”
Both of those are modest claims. Neither says boredom makes you creative. They say the gap — the unfilled minute — may be one of the conditions under which the mind does a certain kind of work. I’d guess most of you reading this had those gaps as children.
I am wary of romanticizing my own childhood here, because memory edits these things. The long summers I remember outside, with no adult-led plan and a vague rule about being home by dark, were probably not the steady idyll I now picture. There were also some dead afternoons. There was the heavy stuck feeling of having nothing to do and nobody to do it with. What I can say honestly is that boredom was not easily interrupted. There was no entertainment machine in my pocket. So whatever the brain does in those gaps — drifting toward an idea, noticing the sky, or just being quietly restless until something happens — happened.
I do not want to turn this into advice about how anyone else should raise their children. I am not a parent, and I am not a psychologist. But I have been a teacher, and I have nieces I try to set a good example for. And I think there is something worth noticing here.
Children learn partly from what we tell them, but perhaps more from what we make look normal. And right now, what many of us make look normal is that no pause should be left alone. The kettle boils, we reach. The lift doors close, we reach. A conversation lulls for three seconds, we reach. The lesson is not spoken, but it is still there: empty time is something to escape.
If boredom does have any quiet usefulness — if those small gaps give the mind room to wander, combine things, settle, or simply be with itself — then the question is not only whether children still get bored. It is whether they ever see adults tolerate boredom without immediately filling it.
I think, it leaves a question worth sitting with: what are our own reflexes teaching?
Maybe the childhood boredom we remember was never the gift nostalgia makes it seem. But it gave the mind something modern life rarely gives it by accident anymore: a gap. And maybe, before we worry too much about whether children know what to do with boredom, we might start by asking whether we still do.
