It happens every summer. Your son or daughter can't wait for school to end. "It's so exciting! Just think, waking up with no going to class and no homework! Nothing I have to do!"
How liberating can life get? But after about a day of this delicious freedom, comes the let down - boredom. "There's nothing to do!" School may not be fun, but at least it structures your life and keeps you busy wih demands.
For many parents, their child's feeling bored seems like a trivial state, like feeling embarrassed. In fact, both are dangerous emotions, particularly during early adolescence (ages 9 -13, see 2/16/09 entry) when the separation from childhood, the loss of childhood identity, and the self-consciousness from becoming different are underway.
At this time of transition, embarrassment is one small step from public humiliation and from shame that can threaten fragile self-worth. This is why parents must never tease, ridicule, put down, or laugh at their early adolescent. Parents are too powerful and the young person is too vulnerable for this humorous attention to feel safe.
As for boredom, it is much more serious than it appears, because it is painful. Boredom = loneliness. At loose ends, young people feel in limbo. "I have no satisfying way to connect with myself, with other people, or with the world!"
Everybody needs some meaningful attachment and some meaningful activity to feel okay. Protract boredom long enough and people of any age become lonely from lack of companionship, restless from not knowing what to with themselves, and eager to escape the discomfort.
Early adolescence, when one is already feeling more disconnected from the younger self one was and from parents who used to feel so close, is a terrible time to feel bored. A child has more tolerance for boredom than does an early adolescent. The reason is because the child still has a solid connection to herself and parents that the early adolescent, by rejecting that old family role and identity, has lost. She doesn't want to be defined and treated as just a child anymore.
Part of the loss of early adolescence is the loss of interest in activities that used to captivate the child. "I don't do that kid stuff anymore!" Growing up is giving up and given up is much that was beloved. No more building blocks, no more playing with dolls and stuffed animals, no more Kiddie TV and elctromic games, no more wanting parents as primary playmates.
Now she wants to act and be considered more grown up, but she doesn't know how to get this to happen. She is filled with negative certainty about how she doesn't want to be; however, she has no positive certainty yet about how she does want to be. This is why adolescence starts with loneliness from disconnection and why boredom at this age is doubly discomforting. It adds one source of loneliness upon another.
Because boredom at this age can be so painful, it is natural that young people would become restless and irritable in its throws and would welcome opportunities for escape. At this time, the world of electronic entertainment and computer assisted communication can have a powerful allure. To their dismay, parents watch their son or daughter spending endless hours mindlessly getting away from themselves. But they are more concerned about the dangers of social escape.
The social solution early adolescents seek when they are bored and don't know what to do with themselves is to seek the company of like-minded friends to do something, anything, together because that beats suffering from doing nothing alone. Thus boredom becomes a staging area for impulse, often the more exciting the better as one member of the group wildly suggests, "I know what we can do!" Now, in collective relief, everyone else follows along. And perhaps an episode of risk taking, trouble making, or substance experimentation begins.
For parents of early adolescents, the guideline is simply this: keep your son or daughter busy enough - with interest activities, at skill practice, doing household work, providing services to others, and participating in family projects and events, that protracted boredom doesn't set in.
Does this mean that boredom is nothing but bad? It does not. The other side of boredom is opportunity. Assuming a young person does not resort to electronic escape, not knowing what to do with ones self can be a chance to develop independence and resourcefulness. Boredom poses a problem: "What am I going to do with myself now?"
To answer this question and figure out a satisfying solution can not only be a creative challenge, it can open the young person up to inventive possibilities for self-entertainment, self-exploration, and self-expression.
This is the delicate judgment that parents of bored early adolescents must make. They want the young person to stay busy, but not so busy that he doesn't have some boring down time to figure out how to occupy himself.
They want him not just to resort to external electronic media for entertainment, but also to rely on internal effort to create his own. And although they want to schedule him into performance activities to develop special skills and interests, they also want him to have enough unstructured time to develop his capacities for cultivating interests, keeping himself good company, and developing a capacity for resourceful play.
Next week's entry: Parent/adolescent conflict - fighting to communicate.
For more information about my book on adolescence, "The Connected Father," see: www.carlpickhardt.com
