My View: Madeleine McDonald

I’M bored! The most annoying words a child can utter, guaranteed to exasperate any parent. Come the school holidays, you load yourself up with food, drink, sports paraphernalia and toys, and take them to the park with their friends, only for them to collapse back at your feet after five minutes of galloping in the fresh air.

“We’re bored!”

“Get used to it,” was my response when my son was small, on the grounds that the cure to being bored is to accept it and learn to just be.

“Why don’t you pretend to be a dog?” Even bored children love dogs and marvel at a dog’s ability to snooze while remaining alert to its surroundings.

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It is pointless to read them a lecture about children in poor countries who sleep under the bench where they spend their airless working days, or to compare them with girl children denied an education because their job is to fetch water for the family, bucketful after bucketful. You have to be an adult to comprehend inequality.

You also have to grow up before you appreciate the joy of spending time doing nothing much. Pottering around, freed from the tyranny of a timetable or deadline, is an undervalued activity that refreshes the spirit as much as meditation does. Think of all those soothing little jobs that keep your hands busy while setting your imagination free.

Paradoxically, pottering requires the skill of concentration. Before you can perform a task without thinking, you have to concentrate on learning how to do it. Imagination also requires you to practise and focus. Children of the electronic age, fingers flitting over the television control or the latest gadget, receive scant training in concentration. If they never learn how to wean themselves off the drug of stimulation and relax into an acceptance of being, they will take their frustration out on others.

Going to the other extreme and weaning them off electronic games with hectic activity schedules, also gives them no opportunity to meander into their own chance discoveries about themselves and world around them.

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Complaints about boredom reflect an expectation that mum or dad is duty-bound to provide entertainment at every waking moment. When that attitude of entitlement is extended to the world in general, it’s no wonder so many grown-ups feel let down by life.

As an adult, making time to relax is an act of will. It means planning. It means setting priorities. Do you choose to spend a restful hour knitting for pleasure, or do you spend that hour tackling the ironing and stoking up your resentment? (Forget the ironing, I say).

Balance is a life skill we need to pass on to our children.