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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, August 12, 2005

Boredom may breed creativity

By James A. Fussell
Knight Ridder News Service


WHAT IS THERE TO DO?

OK, so now your kids are bored. They find some things to do on their own, but eventually they come to you for help. Now what? How do you encourage creative use of their downtime? We asked Jon Adolph, editor of Family Fun magazine, and other experts for tips:

Do something together as a family. Cook something, grow something, tie-dye something, play a game, make paper airplanes, start a craft project or pitch a tent in the backyard.

Have a boredom jar. Whenever you find something enjoyable that has helped your children pass the time in a creative and fun way, write it down and throw it in the jar. When your kids are ultrabored, pull it out and agree to help them do whatever they pull out.

Have a stay-at-home vacation. Put up signs around the house saying you're on vacation. Then spend half the money you would have spent on airline tickets, hotels and food on exploring an area around your house, in all directions. Splurge on all the things you've always wanted to do around your home.

Have a scavenger hunt with digital cameras. List 30 things kids can find around the neighborhood: a blue parked car, a statue, something red, a wrought-iron railing, a wooden deck, a dog or cat, a fountain and something they've never seen before. Then send them out. The more items you have, the longer it will take them to get pictures of them. Be creative.

Have fun. Repeat. Play the desert island game — there are a million variations on this theme. If you were marooned on a desert island and could take only three foods, what would they be and why? Involve several people. If you could take music from only three artists or bands, which would they be and why? Then discuss, argue, have fun.

— Knight Ridder News Service

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Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

Aren't they?

Many parents are convinced of it. They fret over leaving too much free time for their children. They worry they'll get in trouble, fall behind their peers or grow up lazy and unproductive. As a result, many cram their kids' schedules with laundry lists of highly productive activities. The result: Their children are so challenged, enriched, stimulated and busy they don't have time for anything else.

But now, as legions of overscheduled children are shuttled from one activity to another, and frazzled families struggle to keep up, experts are making a case for one more thing parents should try to wedge into their children's lives: a healthy dose of good old-fashioned boredom.

"I think boredom has a great deal to recommend it," said Phil McKnight, professor of education and western civilization at the University of Kansas. "We live in a world of multistimuli, which often precludes the time to reflect or be creative."

Mark and Connie Mulich don't mind having children who are occasionally bored.

"If my kids are bored, we sit down and talk about what they can do," Connie Mulich said. "I won't solve their boredom for them, but I will assist in giving them ideas. I'll tell them what their dad and I did when we were kids, such as put blankets over chairs and make a large tent."

Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, said the reduction in creative boredom cheats kids out of a key part of their creative development — even if they end up very smart.

"There is a part of life that is reflective and contemplative, and a part of life that is creative where we let children invent things with their own devices," he said. "That seems to have been crowded by the schedule of planned events."

The result: more high achievers who can stick to a schedule but may have a hard time thinking outside the box.

"What we see here at Duke and many elite universities is kids consulting their calendars every half-hour because they always have to be at a different place," he said. "How much critical learning, how much reflective thought is going into that life?"

The casualty, he said, can be happiness.

"There is a danger that you do things simply to get yourself to the next stage, and you fail to appreciate the worth of what you are doing now. Then the next stage becomes a launching pad to the one after that. It's an endless cycle."

Dodd believes so much in the power of contemplative boredom, he'd like to issue a challenge to college admissions officers around the country.

"I'd like to see them remove the 13 lines (in application forms) dedicated to extracurricular activities and substitute measures for passionate and reflective learning," he said.

Award-winning journalist and author Anna Quindlen credited boredom with helping her become who she is as a writer and a human being.

"Ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call 'doing nothing' is when human beings actually do their best thinking and when creativity comes to call," she wrote in a Newsweek column.

"Downtime," she wrote, "is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity."

As for wasting time being a sin?

"Time is all we really have in life," said McKnight, the Kansas professor. "It's a precious gift that we sometimes neglect and squander. But if we really were to treat it with the respect it deserves, we would realize that some of our time should go toward pondering. To the outside world that looks like laziness, but it's actually very productive. It's just that it's invisible."

Sabbaticals are a good example — quiet time to think away from the rush of the routine. History has shown they can be some of the most creative, positive and productive times in a professional's life.

But letting your kids be bored can just seem wrong — or at best irresponsible.

Giving your kids more creative freedom doesn't mean absolving parents of all responsibilities. Unsupervised kids left completely alone can get into trouble and develop bad habits, such as sitting in front of a screen 16 hours a day.

And no one's saying you should stop stimulating your kids. But if you consistently overschedule your children so they always have something to do, or become their personal circus at the first sign of inactivity, you may be doing exactly the wrong thing.

A child who is always artificially amused or busied — by TV, video games, DVDs or overzealous scheduling — is missing something, experts say: learning healthy and creative ways to spend free time.

When parents stop always rushing in to solve their children's problems with planned activities, kids may whine, complain and annoy. They also will learn to think, create and grow.