Are your children bored easily? It is absolutely normal. However, we offer you some useful tips that will help you better manage and manage that boredom, to take advantage of it.
With the arrival of summer holidays, families are faced with a dilemma: what to do with my son during this period? Then begins the incessant search for courses, activities, outings, summer camps and other stimuli to ensure that the phrase so feared by parents does not arrive: “Mom, Dad, I’m bored.”
What is boredom?
The Dictionary defines boredom as the tiredness of the spirit caused by lack of stimuli, entertainment or distractions. So, according to the dictionary, when our son is bored we can say that he no longer has more to do and that he enters a depressed state of his mood.
How terrible! At that precise moment, the internet and television, continents of infinite stimuli, are the resources most used by parents to automatically make the discomfort that their children are about to go through and from which we think they will never recover disappear. But what if we let them get bored? Are we bad parents?
Another vision of boredom
In contradiction to the aforementioned position, psychologists all over the world observe boredom as an activity that promotes others, that is, as an internal motor. These affirm that people to overcome boredom implement psychological strategies that turn the situation that currently bores them into an opportunity to evolve towards another more complex objective or another more pleasant activity.
What we have previously called the internal motor is what is considered in psychology as an internal stimulus. This concept can be defined as the internal signals of our body, such as: the feeling of thirst, hunger, sleep or desire to perform some activity.
As soon as we are aware of these situations, our body focuses on responding and restoring balance. Therefore, just as we educate our children to be self-sufficient when they are thirsty or hungry, we must educate them to be self-sufficient to resolve emotional conflicts such as boredom.
If we fill the children’s calendar with random activities with the sole purpose of preventing the feeling of boredom, in addition to curbing the psychological tools that promote personal growth and independence, perhaps we are preventing the child from discovering for himself what he is doing. It really interests you.
Boredom and Creativity
Once the boredom barrier is crossed, a different world opens up to the child than the one he is not used to. There is absolutely no one who fills him with external stimuli (those that come from the environment such as television, interpersonal relationships), so he will have to be the one who manages to motivate himself to carry out any other activity.
This process undoubtedly promotes creativity since it makes the child analyze the possibilities of action that are within his reach and the level of satisfaction that they will produce. In this way, your child will not only learn to manage his emotions but will also be able to discover new hobbies and interests that help him confirm himself as a person, develop a solid personality and build good self-esteem.
How to help my child manage boredom?
First of all, the child must be shown that boredom is just another feeling, such as sadness or joy, and that it is okay to talk about it not as a search for solutions by the family to avoid it, but as sharing an emotion. Teach him that boredom is part of life and that it will appear throughout it on many occasions. And that above all the solution to this feeling is within him and not without.
Second, offer you tools. With tools we refer to both physical ones as materials and resources that you can use in your free time as well as psychological tools such as small tricks to move from one activity to another. A good example is to make a list at the beginning of the summer of the things that the child likes to do the most (whether accompanied or alone) in order to remind him of all that he can use his time.
Once the list has been made, it must be displayed in order to give the child the possibility to read it at any time. In the case of children who have not yet acquired reading skills, this list can be made from pictures or pictograms.
In this way, instead of the passive phrase “I’m bored” appears, the child will exchange with the adult various options of activities to proactively manage their boredom, such as: “Dad, mom, why don’t we go to the movie theater?”.
