Aisea e lelei ai le fiu i nisi taimi?

Many parents tend to paint their child’s summer vacation literally by the hour. Organize everything so that not a single week goes to waste, without new trips and impressions, without interesting games and useful activities. We are afraid even to imagine that the child will wake up one morning and will not know what to do.

“Don’t be so afraid of boredom and overload children in the summer, says child psychologist Lyn Fry, an educational specialist. – If the whole day of a child is full of activities organized by adults, this prevents him from finding something of his own, from understanding what he is really interested in. The task of parents is to help their son (daughter) find their place in society, become an adult. And being an adult means being able to keep ourselves busy and find things to do and hobbies that bring us joy. If parents devote all their time to planning their child’s free time, then he will never learn to do it himself.

“It is through boredom that we are internally stimulated to be creative,” confirms Teresa Belton, a development specialist at the University of East Anglia. “The absence of classes encourages us to try to do something new, unusual, to come up with and implement some idea.” And although our chances of being left to ourselves have diminished markedly with the development of Internet technologies, it is worth heeding the words of experts who have been talking about the importance of “doing nothing” for the development of a child for several decades. In 1993, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote that the ability to endure boredom can be an important achievement in a child’s development: «Boredom is our chance to contemplate life rather than race through it.»¹.

In his opinion, one of the most depressing demands of adults on a child is that he must be occupied with something interesting even before he gets the opportunity to understand what, in fact, interests him. But in order to understand this, the child needs time that is not occupied by anything else.

Find what’s really interesting

Lyn Fry invites parents to sit down with their children at the beginning of the summer and together make a list of things that the child could enjoy doing during the holidays. There may be such typical activities as playing cards, reading books, cycling. But there may be more complex, original ideas, such as cooking dinner, staging a play, or taking pictures.

And if a child comes up to you one summer complaining of boredom, tell him to look at the list. So you give him the right to decide for himself which business to choose and how to dispose of free hours. Even if he doesn’t find it. what to do, there is no problem that he will mope. The main thing is to understand that this is not a waste of time.

“I think that children should learn to be bored in order to motivate themselves to do some work and achieve their own goals,” explains Lin Fry. “Letting a child be bored is one way to teach him to be independent and rely on himself.”

A similar theory was advanced in 1930 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who devoted a chapter to the meaning of boredom in his book The Conquest of Happiness. “Imagination and the ability to cope with boredom must be trained in childhood,” writes the philosopher. “A child develops best when, like a young plant, it is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of experiences, is not good for a young creature, as they grow older they make him unable to endure a fruitful monotony.².

faitau atili luga o le upega tafaʻilagi Quartz

¹ A. Phillips «On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life» (Harvard University Press, 1993).

² B. Russell «The Conquest of Happiness» (Liveright, 2013).