I cannot blame her. While I used to simply go outside to a friend who lived next door and we would walk all around the village, sometimes climb over a fence and steal apples from the neighbours' garden, tasting our way through them and finding our favourite apple supplier, my daughter is growing up differently.
Today we live very often in isolation with our children. We adults remain anonymous to each other as well. It has become increasingly difficult to make new contacts.
I have a list of activities in my head at all times, the way most parents do. A drawer full of art supplies. A shelf of books. A playground nearby. We are lucky that we live not far from a ski area where we can ski in winter and go for a hike in summer, as well as a small lake we can walk around or take a boat on.
Sometimes I have had enough of being an entertainer for my child and I tell her to figure it out alone. Sometimes it helps and she sits down at the table and will start drawing something but oftentimes it ends in discussions.
So lately I have often been thinking about how we are as parents nowadays always occupied with one quietly exhausting question: how do I avoid screen time today?
There is an entire economy built on the premise that a bored child is a problem to be solved.
Enrichment programs. Structured playdates. Educational apps that promise to make screen time productive—and I hate those. Camps for every conceivable interest, scheduled from the first week of summer to the last—I love those, but not everyone has the money for them. The assumption underneath all of it is the same: idle time is wasted time, and wasted time is a failure of parenting.
That assumption is not just wrong. It is actively costing our children something they cannot easily get back.
We have built a culture of optimised childhood in which every hour is accounted for and every activity needs to have a measurable outcome. Children are shuttled from school to sport to music to tutoring with barely a gap between, and the gaps that do exist are filled with screens that provide a continuous stream of stimulation requiring nothing from them in return. We have made it structurally almost impossible for a child to be bored, and we have done this believing we were giving them an advantage, but the research suggests otherwise.
Jamie Jirout, associate professor at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development, has spent years studying how curiosity develops in children.
Her research shows that unstructured, screen-free time is not empty time. It is the condition under which curiosity and creativity are most likely to emerge. When children are left without external stimulation and asked to generate their own, their minds activate.
Dr. Sandi Mann, senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and author of The Upside of Downtime, takes this further. Boredom, she argues, stimulates the brain to seek out creative solutions. The mind that has nothing to engage with turns inward, begins to wander, and in that wandering finds connections and ideas it would never encounter in a state of constant stimulation. The daydream is not a distraction from thinking. It is a form of it.
The Child Mind Institute adds another layer: boredom builds tolerance for discomfort, which is one of the most underrated skills a person can carry into adult life.
Put simply: the child who learns to sit with boredom is building something in their brain that no app, no enrichment program, and no structured activity can build for them.
I understand the impulse to fill the silence. I feel it myself, regularly. When my daughter says she is bored, something in me hears: you are not doing enough. You are not providing enough. You are failing at this.
It annoys me when I see how this feeling has been cultivated carefully by a culture that equates good parenting with constant provision, and by an industry that profits from that equation. If boredom is a problem, then there is always something to buy that will solve it.
But the evidence points in a different direction entirely. Children who are allowed to experience boredom regularly, and to find their own way through it, develop planning strategies, problem-solving skills, emotional resilience, and a capacity for independent thought that structured activities simply cannot replicate.
We are raising a generation that has almost never had to sit with discomfort. We have optimised it away. And then we wonder why they struggle when life, which is not optimised, eventually arrives.
I grew up in the countryside. My days were spent outside from morning until evening. My parents were constantly occupied with work and had no time to fill my days for me. The street was our playground.
What I understand now, looking back at those years, is that the freedom I had was the presence of space—space to be restless and then, eventually, to find my own way out of it. Space to be bored and to discover that boredom is not something that must be constantly fought.
That capacity, to sit with nothing and eventually make something of it, is a skill you develop through repetition and through the particular discomfort of not being rescued every time it gets hard.
My daughter is growing up differently. And some of what she is missing is not something I can give her with a better activity list. Some of what she is missing, by contrast, is simply unhurried time. The kind of time that used to be ordinary and has quietly become rare.
Letting a child be bored is harder than it sounds, and not because children resist it—though they do at first. It is harder because it requires us to resist something in ourselves. The urge to help, to fix, to provide. The anxiety that idle time is wasted time. The cultural pressure that says a good parent is always doing something.
It asks us to trust that discomfort is not damaging. That the child staring at the ceiling or the one without five different hobbies is not falling behind. That the hour spent doing apparently nothing might be the most productive hour of the week, in ways that will not show up on any measurable outcome for years.
It asks us to reframe what we hear when a child says: I am bored. Not as a complaint to be resolved, but as a signal that something good is about to happen if we get out of the way.
None of this means abandoning structure entirely. Children need rhythm and routine and the security that comes from knowing what happens next. What they do not need is every moment accounted for.
Jamie Jirout's research suggests a simple starting point: if a child seems stuck, offer one or two very open-ended prompts—building a fort, making something with what is in the garden, starting a long-term project they can return to on a daily or weekly basis. Then step back. Give them the direction and let them choose. The goal is not to direct but to remove the obstacle of the blank page.
The discomfort fades with practice. For the child and, more slowly, for us.
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The most important thing we can give a child is not an activity. It is the confidence that they can generate their own.
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