Entertainment Entitlement: Why Your Kids Are Always Bored

Kids have been telling their parents they’re bored for as long as there have been parents. Nothing new there. But lately, it seems different. Many 21st-century kids, especially bright or neurodivergent kids, report being bored a lot. They’re bored at school. They’re bored on short car trips. They’re bored when they’re home and stuck inside without a friend. They’re bored outside if there’s nobody nearby to play with. They’re bored reading a book, bored between activities, and sometimes they’re even bored five minutes after doing something exciting.

They go to a trampoline park or spend the afternoon swimming and, on the way home, ask, “What else is there to do?” It’s easy to label this as being “spoiled rotten,” but I think there’s more going on here than boredom in the traditional sense. I have begun to call this expectation of never being bored: "Entertainment Entitlement".

What is boredom for kids?

There’s been a small boom in writing lately about boredom — how it happens, whether it matters, and what might be lost when we never experience it. The New York Times recently ran a piece about influencers trying to convince people to do… nothing. Authors and psychologists argue that boredom can be useful: it may spark creativity, reflection, imagination, or simply give the brain a break from constant activity. In other words, boredom isn’t a malfunction — it’s part of being human.

The usual villains in these articles are familiar: cell phones, highly stimulating screens, and a culture obsessed with productivity. We live in a world where there is always something else we “could” be doing. There is always another video, another notification, another dopamine hit waiting. Our devices are intentionally designed that way. The people who develop this technology are smart. Smarter than the rest of us. And most of the kids and teens I work with already understand this. They know tech companies want their attention because attention equals profit. They’re not naïve about that part.

Are we bored, or always looking for entertainment?

I want to add another layer to the conversation — something I call entertainment entitlement.

By entertainment entitlement, I mean the learned expectation that there should always be something interesting, stimulating, or distracting available — and that boredom means something has gone wrong. Instead of boredom being a neutral or even useful state, kids (and many adults) experience boredom as a failure of the environment. Someone or something is supposed to fix it.

Source: Randy Kulman

This isn’t just about screens. It’s a psychological orientation toward the world.

Kids are not growing up in a world where they can be “left to their own devices” — and yes, I mean that in the old-fashioned sense, not just the literal one. Their lives are full of structured activities, entertainment options, academic demands, and digital stimulation. It is genuinely difficult to be bored anymore.

And it isn’t just the kids. Adults abhor boredom, too. Most of us, and I fully include myself here, try to fill our moments of silence or solitude by reaching for our phones. Even when I go for a walk, I rarely forget to bring my headphones so I can listen to a book or a podcast. One of my old friends routinely nudges me to forgo the technology and do nothing but listen to the birds, smell the trees, and watch the changing seasons on our beautiful 8-mile bike path. Waiting at the doctor’s office, standing in line, sitting in the car, we are compelled to scroll, text, watch, read, and refresh. Kids don’t just learn this by observing their parents; they live inside it.

Parents inadvertently facilitate Entertainment Entitlement

Parents often unintentionally reinforce this pattern. When children are infants, parenting guides encourage lots of talking, sensory experiences, physical play, and an ongoing barrage of attention in between naps, sleeping, eating, and pooping. If you are a “good and involved” parent of a younger child, you are expected to serve as a full-time activity director, organizing playdates, sports, camps, and experiences. We’ve shifted from “free play” to “curated engagement.” Later, the same kids are surrounded by a culture where there is always something else happening, always someone else doing something more exciting. This parenting style creates a sense of entitlement to entertainment.

So when kids say they’re bored, it’s not just a complaint, it’s almost a worldview.

This connects directly to neurodivergent children. Kids with ADHD, autism, learning differences, anxiety, or emotional regulation problems often experience boredom more intensely. Fast-paced, high-reward stimulation is highly appealing because it provides the brain with what it craves: novelty and dopamine. Reading a book, sitting through a class, or tolerating downtime requires effort and tolerating a little bit of boredom. And effort isn’t always something kids are wired to sustain without support.

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So is entertainment entitlement an epidemic? Maybe not. But it is a cultural pattern with psychological consequences. Many kids and adults genuinely don’t know how to cope with unstructured time anymore. They don’t know how to be bored. They don’t know how to simply exist without input. And instead of judging that, I think it’s worth understanding how we got here — and what it means for development, attention, and emotional life.

I’m not going to offer “8 Great Solutions to Your Child’s Boredom” and how to lessen entertainment entitlement in this post. For now, I hope that you might become better at noticing and naming it.

Source: Randy Kulman

Entertainment entitlement didn’t appear overnight. It sits at the intersection of technology design, parental pressures and expectations, and the shrinking space for stillness in our digital world. And while screens play a big role, they aren’t the whole story. Culture, psychology, and family life matter too.

Maybe the first step is simply acknowledging that boredom isn’t a crisis and that constant entertainment doesn’t have to be the default setting.