Children should be allowed to get bored | Hacker News Reader

Children should be allowed to get bored

bbc.co.uk

102 pointsequilibrium52 comments

The other day I was reading a lamentation about the rise of team sports for kids. Little league, etc. Before that you could just put a group of kids in a park and they would make up their own game. It was a creative process.

Now you tell them exactly what to do -- and it's totally rigid and even a bit jingoistic.

Another related issue is the lack of safe open public space in which children can play. With the rise of subdivisions and a general downturn in neighborliness the only way to get access to open play space is to join a 'team' or club sport of some kind.

As a parent I also fear sending my kid down to the park on their own honestly, even in my relatively safe neighborhood. Which is sad.

Are public spaces really that unsafe though? Or, at least, less safe than they have been in the past? Honest question.

I've read a bunch of articles (that I cannot look up right now) that argue that this decrease in safety is mostly perception, and I'm inclined to agree.

I grew up in the 'ghetto' of my hometown, and then from 8 tot 17 I lived in what was considered a dangerous, third-world country. Still, my parents mostly raised me as any kid in earlier times: be home before dark, don't go too far, but do whatever you want the rest of the time outside of school.

By and large, my experience has not been too different from other kids I know in safer environments, and I've had few 'scary' experiences involving other people. Most 'dangers' involved general kids-being-stupid things: crossing streets without looking, or climbing things at the risk of falling down on the pavement head-first, egging each other on to do something stupid, etc.

My point is, I can't really see the danger, and would like to know what you consider 'lacking'. Kidnapping is rare, sexual harassment is vastly more common in family circles, playgrounds have mostly become safer (and less fun, IMO), and violence of any kind by adults to children is (I think) relatively uncommon too. Even in dangerous areas.

Of course, I am no parent. And I admit I present no actual supporting evidence (right now) other than my own experience. But I'm not really trying to prove something, just interested in your take on this. Maybe I'm missing something important that I would be aware of with some context, or with the experience of being a parent

A park with no other people in it is / sensibly percieved to be unsafe.

Yet put a regular soccer game there, add in seats so that lunchtime workers sit down for a sandwich, encourage adults to take lengthy actions that simply involve bein there and the place both becomes safer and feels safer.

It's human nature to feel safer in a well lit, public space

The space is rarely the issues - it's the lack of other people

Blame the car culture firstly, blame bad architects next, blame atrocious town planners mostly

If we want to feel safe we know how - have adults outside.

Interesting. I can see how architecture plays a role in this.

My experiences were mostly in large towns and cities, where the architecture was sufficiently 'open' and 'organic' to perhaps make the areas safer than the ones you mean (even despite the 70s / 80s ugly and depressing concrete-everywhere approach that needs little more than some graffiti to look like a ghetto.)

One important aspect is density; Another is to have relatively mixed usage blocks with lively things like storefronts or entrances near the sidewalk as often as possible, rather than a street-facing brick wall on three sides, or expanses of lawn or parking lots.

* "You may got to the park, as long as it's with your friends". Predators can't feasibly attack a group of several children, especially children armed with cell phones.

* Support big sidewalks in urban areas: with enough eyes on the street, busy places become remarkably safe places to be once children learn the basic rules of navigation

What's different is awareness. Child abductions, police brutality, etc. are now far better publicized.

Even so...

A girl was grabbed on her way to my son's elementary school and later found dead on a secluded beach, having been violated.

It's hard to not freak out. I absolutely was an over protective father. Intellectually, I knew the risk to my son was infinitesimal. But why chance it?

By comparison...

A classmate of mine was grabbed, but broke free, on her way to school. We were all freaked out about it. But parents didn't start driving their kids to school en masse.

Maybe our parents were pollyannas.

I recently was on a long solo hike and my smartphone ran out of batteries. With no music or anyone to talk to I had to find something to think about for the 2 hours it would take to complete the hike. I ended up going through each year of my life and thinking about where I lived and what I was doing at the time and memories associated with each time and place. It was actually quite entertaining.

Sorry but I think you missed something. You should have let the emptiness and the boredom fill your self instead of proactively and orderly going through the years of your life.

The point of the article is that boredom spurs stuff like this guy mentioning, it is you that missed the point.

a mindful / "zen" meditation would ask you to return to the state of being (i.e. not thinking) after you've noticed that you're thinking, but that's not the technique the scientists are suggesting in the OP, nor what the parent comment is talking about.

Searching for a topic to think about is the kind of creative process they're trying to encourage, and indeed it's not unlike a brief bit of mindfulness, in this case followed by a lengthy period of introspection. Assuming that the introspection doesn't fall into a negative spiral of memories and emotions, this is reasonably mindful in itself.

I go through this process while running. I highly recommend everyone to jog/run for about 30-40 minutes every day, alone, wit no music. It performs a "defrag" of your brain and relieves most of the stress and worries.

When I was a kid we were somewhere that was boring as hell, so I laid on a bench and stared up at the tiled ceiling. I noticed that for a square (n x n) block of tiles that n^2 = sum(1..n) + sum(1..n-1). From playing with the numbers in my head, I was able to derive the formula the sum(1..n) = n(n+1)/2. Later when I learned Gauss' formula in school for the sum if integers, I was like "Hey, I invented that!". Those kinds of thought experiments just don't happen if you're staring at an Xbox all day.

wow, that would not happen to me if i was bored!

Nice. I figured out sum(1..n) = n(n+1)/2 in a slightly way (well, sum(0..n-1) = n(n-1)/2). My grandfather played chess in a club, and he had these sheets of game results where everybody played everybody else once. I wondered how many blocks there were in the table. Well, it looks like a right triangle of height n and base n (which has area nn/2) but with n little triangles notched out (total area n/2). So the area of the blocks is (nn-n)/2, and each has area 1, so there are n(n-1)/2 of them.

I recently spent some time in hospital fighting pneumonia. Hospitals are exceptionally boring places. I loved it. I loved not having to do anything, not having to make decisions, not having to constantly think. The highest priority of my day at one point was moving things from my table to my drawer. It was awesome.

I think we fill our lives with so much stuff that there's so little space for little things, but when I was rearranging things on my table I hadn't felt so free of responsibilities and decisions in years.

I thought about this among my Facebook friends before replying here. I agree with the premise that children need plenty of time in their youth that isn't overly structured by adults. That's one of the reasons that my family homeschools rather than sending our children to our fine local public school system (which draws in students from all over the state through open enrollment). By test, and by verification through conversation with other adults who know our children, our children have no problem learning the essential information that children need to learn in childhood for independent adult life. But they learn more efficiently, because of the flexibility of homeschooling, and they thus have more time to pursue personal interests and creative activities. (The creative activities include short story writing for all our children, programming in a variety of languages for our oldest, and visual art for all the younger children.)

We do have our children in some external programs that structure some of their time. We particularly like our local youth soccer association because its coaching philosophy strongly emphasizes letting the young players make their own decisions on the field and not coaching from the sidelines. I never knew that there was such a thing as "creativity" in soccer until I watched dozens of games over several years and saw how each of our children expresses a different personality on the soccer field, all while coordinating effort with teammates. Soccer truly is a beautiful game when played by players who have played together for a decade and who know one another.

AFTER EDIT: I beg to differ with the comment quoted below,

There are great rockers from places nobody would remotely associate with great music (Bob Dylan and Prince are both from Minnesota, for instance).

from another top-level comment in this thread. I associate Minnesota with great music, because I live here. (Dylan and Prince are all right, but I'm not sure I'd even agree that they are the peak of what Minnesota has to offer in music. And Minnesota is by no means the most boring state in the United States, as my mother who moved here from elsewhere is glad to let people know.)

>> And Minnesota is by no means the most boring state in the United State

That's true. We still have Wisconsin. :)

I think the Dakotas would like to have a word with you.

Also, Wyoming.

It's not that Minnesota is boring. It's that a lot of people think it is.

Have you ever lived in California? I'm from Colorado. A lot of people I know in California think of the rest of the US aside from New York as boring. There is a reason behind the phrase "flyover state."

It's not that it's boring. It's that a lot of people don't know any better simply because they come from the coasts.

Except that Minnesota actually is boring.

Boredom is when we let our mind run free, in search of things that would be interesting to us. If our mind is occupied with distractions, it becomes harder to focus.

My parents came up with a great way to make sure my brother and I always found ways to entertain ourselves: saying "I'm bored" to my parents was the same as saying "I need a chore to do around the house."

me too - equally, sitting staring into space was an invitation to a "you look like you have time to..." from my Dad.

I think "getting bored" is the wrong term, she is talking about the fact that children should learn to find things to battle their boredom themselves. Was she still bored when she had a piece of blank paper and nothing to do?

Her conclusion seems to be that only letting the brain consume is numbing but that creation and creativity come when the media that lets you mindlessly consume is not available. This media is acting as a drug, numbing creativity. I agree with that notion.

Less focus on "boredom", more focus on unstructured time. Boredom implies the child's own attempts at entertaining themselves has failed.

Then again, I consider myself a pretty creative person, even though I insist on plenty of instructions when it comes to work -- but that may come from needing to deal with other people's expectations vs. my own.

"Creativity" does not win out over pre-existing brand guidelines.

Some amazing artists come from boring places. There are great rockers from places nobody would remotely associate with great music (Bob Dylan and Prince are both from Minnesota, for instance).

I always ponder the number of great musicians who had messed up childhoods, like having the person who they thought was there other turn out to be any aunt or grandmother. The stability my parents provided has always held me back...

Maybe you're right, but there are plenty of 'luminaries' where you could argue it was their stable family life that made it possible. At the very least it shouldn't be an excuse ;-).

Balzac is a better example, he had a frivolous mother and was left alone in a room most of the time. He started telling himself stories and became expert in imagination.

All the Irish authors for instance

I'm sorry to say that, but there was probably very little to do (in their time - today it's slightly better) besides doing the daily chores and going to the pub.

I'm not sure where this reputation that Minnesota is some sort of cultural wasteland comes from. If you ask people associated with the arts, many of them will tell you that Minneapolis has an exceptionally vibrant arts community. Outstanding music scene for both local and national artists, highly regarded theatres, excellent museums, etc.

I didn't call it a wasteland. I'm from Greeley, CO; that's a wasteland. I think that broadly it isn't reputed as an exciting place.

To be fair, the part of Minnesota where Bob Dylan is from is indeed a cultural wasteland.

When I was bored as a child I was miserable. Jumping from one idea of what to do to another, one by one verifying that they will not bring me joy I seek. The only way out of boredom was just wait till I get physically tired of sobbing and feeling horibble, and then having a nap.

Sounds like some of my evenings..

Depression in a nutshell.

My mother always used to tell me "only boring people get bored".

Now with a small child and business to run, some days I would love to be bored and have nothing to do!

Ha, well I first heard that one on Mad Men.

School gives plenty of time for children to be bored.

Not Every children but children should be allowed to get bored.

Run everyone on same track never make anything better. Like People do a single kind of work. When Someone get bored with something they come with a beautiful solution.

Old Jasper Carrot joke:

Straight man - There's a report that children are bored 3/4 of the time at school. This means they are not being prepared for working life

Jasper - really? That sounds like excellent preparation for working life

I completely agree with this writeup, but I believe it depends on the child. Some people feed off of the energy and creativity of outside influences. As an introvert, however, I get overwhelmed over time of being unable to quiet my mind. There are times when listening to my radio will make me feel I'll, and I'll shut it off for weeks as a result, until a time comes along when I want to drown out the chaos rolling around up there. Also, having someone constantly talk to me to try and help me stay awake on a road trip actually has the effect of putting me to sleep, because my brain starts to idle when it's being fed constant stimulation. Imagine explaining that to a loved one who thinks they're helping you out. Definitely an arduous learning experience for all parties involved.

I now spend my 6+ hour road trips in complete silence (radio turned off and everyone else asleep), and it's infinitely helpful time to reconnect with myself and my ideas and aspirations.

When I got bored as a kid or young adult, I'd do things like: learn orgami, draw something, learn a programming language, start and commit to a workout plan, create something interesting. Now my life doesn't really allow time for boredom. That's why I needed to get into grad school: to force myself to set aside time to learn and create. I would love a stimuli drought right about now.

I'm still trying to figure this one out, and should probably dive into the literature on the subject for some more enlightenment (or perhaps someone with more knowledge can share something?)

Here's the thing. I consider my huge lack of formal education one of the best things that happened to me. I was home-schooled from 8 to 18, and the last five years or so I didn't even really have a teacher. I think for a full year I'd just 'phone in' the bare minimum of work, about two hours a day in the study room in our house, and pass the required tests.

I feel like the boredom got out of my system really quickly because of this, and my natural inclination to explore and learn took over, with nobody to tell me learning was dumb or stupid or uncool.

So I read every book I could find, learned programming, and had and developed an active imagination. Two more years of high school and six years of university got a long way to beat this out of me, but it's still mostly there, and I feel it's one of the primary reasons that I feel like I'm 'doing ok'.

Is this just me specifically, or can it be applied to most children/young adults?

Before I leave the house, I always try to line up a set of topics to think about while I'm in transit to where I'm going. Usually, these are design challenges in the projects I am working on or plans for the next thing to work on. Sometimes, I even allow myself to think about blue-sky type applications as a reward for getting more down to earth work done. Yes, I am a nerd, through and through!

Many times I have wondered what I would do if I were confined in prison or became blind. I think, so long as I was mentally okay and had access to a computer to write software, I would be fine. I even considered that if I didn't have a computer, I would be able to entertain myself by implementing the rules of a game that exhibited computational ideas. After all, John Conway's Game of Life[1] was originally played by hand on a board.

[1]http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

It's slightly sad when science journalism relies on "an expert says", without feeling the need to reference any data.

getting myself bored is actually the only way i know to feel like "resetting" and getting fresh idea, views, etc. suppressing hn would be a good idea for this to happen more often tho...

From where I come from, it's normal to let children get bored :)

And where do you come from?

Isn't boredom just response of a body that what he is doing is not effective? So it encourages going doing something that's more effective, efficient and productive.

my take on this subject a year or two ago :P http://jankom.posterous.com/kid

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