Bored Kids are Annoying Kids
Yes, I know “kids need to learn to entertain themselves” but if they're bored, you won't like what they do.
A while ago, I wrote an article called Let Kids be Bored, as I flirted with the idea that maybe it wasn’t my responsibility to keep my kids entertained 24/7, at home and in public. My argument was basically that if you don’t want your kids to be addicted to an iPad, it’s unrealistic to expect to replace that degree of dopamine intake with bespoke napkin and fork puppet shows at restaurants (which will be annoying for you, and pale in comparison to an Elmo’s World episode.) Ergo, to remove (or avoid from day one) the iPad, you must tolerate boredom.
A few months after I wrote that article, I was on a plane ride with my two kids—then four and one. Something happened that challenged my pro-boredom stance. My four-year-old, already a travel veteran, was quietly watching TV (we were on a plane, okay? I refuse to go screen-free on planes. That’s cruel.) My one-year-old, on the other hand, was uninterested in TV or movies and strapped in a carseat. She was exhausted, and desperately needing to fall asleep but understandably freaking out that perhaps we now lived in the back of a Boeing 737 ordering $15 cubed cheese and salami boxes from an “a la smarte” snack menu, and this was how life would just be from now on.
She might have been bored, but boredom wasn’t the issue. The issue was that she had skipped her nap and she really, really needed to fall asleep. But she was one, so she did what any one-year-old would do when either tired or bored: cry inconsolably.
Picking her up and bouncing her wouldn’t have helped. This would have prolonged her awake-time and made her even more pissed off in the long run. I had already attempted, in vain, to “cheer her up” with snuggles and hugs. I knew, unfortunately, that the only thing I could do would be to let her cry in the car seat—not leave her there, not ignore her, but sit with her, hold her hand, and wait until she tired herself out and fell asleep for the rest of the flight. (It also feels relevant that the seatbelt sign was turned on, so, yeah.)
Everyone repeatedly turned to glare at me, and I knew exactly what they were thinking because before I had kids I used to think this too—that stupid mother, she isn’t even DOING anything! She’s just LETTING this baby cry? If that were MY baby, I’d be picking it up, singing songs and playing games with it, which is obviously what she needs to do! She’s just IGNORING the baby because she’s LAZY!
Sure enough, the clown brigade soon showed up. One woman came over and threw some giant cylinder of M&Ms that she got at Duty Free store in my baby’s face, offering that maybe this implement would “entertain” her. I told her, as politely as I could, that her problem wasn’t a lack of exciting branded candy merch but the fact that she needed to fall asleep. Later, just as she was almost asleep, a flight attendant came by and loudly declared, “Hi! She seems so bored, so I made her a rattle out of this old water bottle that she can play with!” She then shoved an empty water bottle full of sugar packets at us.
For some reason, people had decided A.) that any crying baby must be BORED and B.) that if I wasn’t willing to “do my job” and entertain the bored baby, it was on them to step in and parent where I had clearly failed.
People will say that parents are too intensive and stressed about constantly needing to entertain our children. They say we are raising our kids to be unable to tolerate any dip in stimulation because even if they aren’t iPad kids, they’re constantly being stimulated by helicoptering, neurotic moms who refuse to let them experience even one minute of adversity. People will decry how child-centric everything is, and urge parents to “just bring kids along to adult activities,” or better yet, expect children to derive all their entertainment from helping parents with chores. Of course, we shouldn’t give them any screens—not iPads, not TV, not movies, not anything—or we’re lazy and neglectful, but it’s not just the screens. Some people will even argue against the importance of children’s activities and toys at all, since kids don’t really need those things when cool adult objects like spatulas and skillets exist. I like the idea, I really do. But I think these people have a very different idea of how a bored, screen-free child at a boring adult place behaves.
