It is different being a kid now. I cannot honestly remember a day of my childhood where I was so bored that I moped around the house all day complaining about how little there was to do. My childhood was defined and managed by my imagination, a force that compelled me to turn ordinary days into adventures. I could sit in my room for hours with a couple of G.I. Joe figures and spin a story that shook the pillars of the earth. When I finally scored an Atari I didn’t put that thing down for months. When the Commodore 64 came into my life I quickly progressed from playing to coding, never without something to occupy my brain space. Today I watched as a kid came over to our house and proceeded to behave like this was in fact the most boring location on the planet. My boys did little to dissuade him from this belief. Most agreed.
“There’s nothing to do here!” became a gathering cry and behaviors devolved into that of infants. They were bored. The thing that sunk my heart was there was a lot to do while they were busy being bored. We have bikes and skateboards and balls and a block teeming with kids. At home they have dozens of video games and three different consoles–not to mention the computers. Boredom should never happen, but it happens all the time.
I’ve tried diagnosing it. I’ve given them the rundown of everything in the house there is to do (in list form) and they constantly fire back with a chorus of no’s. These are not boring things in our house. I designed the place with kids in mind. We have different consoles and toys and a bounce house. There is all manner of things to do, but nothing they particularly want to do. I’m trying to imagine what it is like inside the mind of a modern kid, where imagination is a thing of the past and all there is to look forward to is what pretty colors and other distractions can be flashed in front of them. Kids are jaded and spoiled as of late–mine seem to be especially so.