We are writers and parents, not clinicians. What follows is a reading of the available writing on boredom, attention, and family life, not psychological advice.
Picture the waiting room. Or the queue at the grocery store. Or those three minutes before a meeting starts. For most of us, there is a reasonable chance that at some point in the last week, we sat in one of those moments and immediately, almost reflexively, pulled out a phone. Not for any particular reason. Just because the stillness was there and the phone was close.
The question is what that habit is quietly costing us, and what it might be costing our children in ways that are harder to see.
According to a 2024 report from Reviews.org, the average American checks their phone 205 times a day. That works out, effectively, to once every five minutes excluding sleep time.
It was also found that almost 81 percent of people check their phones within the first ten minutes of waking up. Before the coffee is made. Before a thought has fully formed. The phone is already in hand.
What the habit actually displaces
Psychology Today‘s overview of boredom research describes the state as a signal that a current “activity or situation isn’t providing engagement or meaning”, so that the person can shift their attention to something more fulfilling. That is the functional version of boredom: it points somewhere.
The generation of people now probably in their thirties and older grew up in a period when that signal had time to land. Saturday afternoons with nothing scheduled meant actual nothing. Car trips meant watching fields go by. There were years of practice at sitting in stillness before constant stimulation became available, and the practice was simply built into ordinary days. Younger children, as clinical psychologist Melanie McNally observes in Psychology Today, often haven’t had that.
The same Psychology Today overview notes that boredom can “spark creative ideas and launch new projects”, and that for children it tends to push them toward new routes of play and self-entertainment, which in turn help build creativity, self-reliance, and the skills that come with sorting things out among themselves.
These are not small things.
The exposure approach for adults
The capacity to sit with boredom is not lost once it has been replaced by a habit of reaching. It can be rebuilt with practice, in the same way other forms of tolerance can be rebuilt.
Heather Lench, Ph.D. points to a method borrowed from anxiety treatment: exposure. The idea is to sit with the discomfort of understimulation in small, manageable doses and extend the window gradually. To be clear, everyday boredom isn’t a clinical condition — Lench is borrowing the technique, not the diagnosis.
This could be simpler than it sounds. Leave the phone in another room during meals. Sit in the car for a minute after parking before reaching for anything. Let the queue be a queue. The point is to come back to those moments often enough that the discomfort becomes familiar rather than something to escape.
The discomfort is the point of entry. Sitting with it, briefly and repeatedly, is how the tolerance builds.
What this looks like for children
For parents, the dynamic seems to run in two directions at once. There is the question of what to do with the children, and the question of what the children are watching the adults do.
As McNally writes, children watch how adults manage their discomfort and absorb those patterns long before they absorb rules. When every open moment of an adult’s life gets filled with emails, scrolling, or background noise, boredom becomes something foreign to the adults too, not only to the children.
And just a heads up, it won’t be easy. McNally puts the case plainly: “Chronic stimulation has eroded kids’ ability to tolerate emotional discomfort without distraction.”
But the benefits are real. As the folks at Child Mind Institute note, boredom can help children to be more creative, build self esteem and engage in original thinking. It makes sense when you think about it; when children are bored and responsible for entertaining themselves without screens, they find new ways to do it. They learn to sit with uncertainty, to make something up, to talk to the other people in the room.
None of that happens if a device arrives the moment the restlessness does. Parental leadership here means giving children space to feel restless without rushing to rescue them, and tolerating the complaints of being bored without quickly offering a solution. That second part is harder than it sounds, particularly when the complaints are loud and the phone is within arm’s reach.
The shape of a small practice
None of this requires an overhaul of family life. A few moments a day where the phone stays in another room. A car ride without a screen. A walk where nobody narrates the walk. A Sunday afternoon where the children are told, plainly, that there will be no plan and they will need to find something. The first stretch is usually the loudest. The complaints arrive on schedule.
But after a while, often quicker than expected, the children find a corner of the house and a piece of string and something is being built.
What we keep coming back to, in our reading of the writing on this, is how easily the small habit slips past us. The phone in the pocket is so quiet a decision that it doesn’t feel like a decision. The reach is faster than the thought. Building the skill back, for ourselves and for our children, starts with noticing the reach and, sometimes, not making it.
