This sort of thinking, while accurate to a point, is going to inevitably result in legions of kids forced to endure artificial boredom to exactly zero benefit to themselves so their parents can talk proudly at dinner parties and on X about how smart and cultured they are.
Classic Learning Test (@CLT_Exam)
It’s okay for your kids to be bored.
C.S. Lewis’s mom had a neurotic fear that her boys would get sick if they went outside in the rain. And Ireland being Ireland, it was raining… basically all the time.
So the Lewis boys spent a ridiculous amount of their childhood stuck indoors with almost nothing to do. No screens, no curated activities, no constant adult entertainment. Just the house, each other, and a bunch of old books lying around.
That boredom didn’t ruin them. It did the opposite. It drove them to read. And one of those boys - little Clive, the youngest - grew up to become C.S. Lewis, one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the entire 20th century. The guy who gave us Narnia, Mere Christianity, the Space Trilogy… all of it.
Think about that for a second. Some of the most imaginative, profound stuff ever written came out of a kid who had nothing better to do than stare at the ceiling and eventually pick up a book because he was bored out of his mind.
We’ve completely flipped the script. Now boredom feels like a parenting failure. The second a kid sighs and says “I’m bored,” we scramble: here’s a tablet, here’s another activity, here’s a YouTube video, let’s go somewhere, let’s do something. We treat boredom like a medical emergency instead of what it actually is - the starting gun for imagination, curiosity, and actual thinking.
Kids used to invent whole worlds in the backyard because there was nothing else to do. They learned to entertain themselves, solve their own problems, and sit with their own thoughts. That muscle is getting weaker every year because we never let it get exercised.
So yeah… the next time your kid is wandering around the house looking tragic and declaring that there’s “nothing to do,” try something radical. Don’t fix it. Don’t hand them a device. Just shrug and say, “Cool. Figure it out.”
You might be raising the next C.S. Lewis. Or at the very least, a kid who knows how to be alone with their own mind without panicking. And that’s a pretty big deal.
— https://nitter.net/CLT_Exam/status/2085457750964756503#m