Boredom: A Cautionary Tale

I used to think boredom was something to avoid, a sign that I wasn’t doing enough as a parent. It took years, a crisis, and a wilderness therapist in the Utah desert to teach me otherwise. What follows is the story of how my son and I both learned to sit still.

As an anxiously leaning person, I grew up without giving boredom much thought. My powers of concentration have always been strong. I never struggled to find motivation, partly because I carried a deep pressure to perform and partly because my obsessive compulsive tendencies kept me moving long past the point of exhaustion.

I had my first child right after finishing my third year of graduate school. He was the little boy who changed my world. I’ve written about him many times before. He’s always been one of my greatest teachers, even when he was driving me to my limits. Which was often.

From the moment he arrived, that high-energy boy had two settings: off and on. Mostly on. He never stopped moving. He wanted to engage with everything and everyone. He talked nonstop, asked endless questions, hated to be alone, and struggled to sit still. When he was eight, he was diagnosed with ADHD. None of us were surprised.

His temperament stood in sharp contrast to his brother. My middle child could lose himself for hours, quietly building train worlds on the carpet of our playroom. He liked solitude. He liked stillness. Boredom didn’t frighten him. It barely registered.

A little more background: when my older boys were young, my husband worked as a hospital-based physician and every other weekend I was essentially a medical widow. The boys were only sixteen months apart, and my oldest was, to put it lovingly, spirited. I learned quickly that slow days were unpleasant. A quiet Saturday at home invited meltdowns from a child who couldn’t tolerate stillness. But if I kept him moving from activity to activity, our days went better. I was tired, but he was regulated.

So we went everywhere. Festivals, playgrounds, historic sites, playdates, children’s shows. I kept the train in motion because it kept the peace. The upside was that my kids were engaged and exposed to the world. The downside was that I unintentionally taught my oldest son that boredom was something to avoid, and even more, that constant motion was the best way through.

And he learned that lesson well.

It’s only through looking back that I can see the flaw in my logic. I thought I was keeping the peace by keeping him busy, but boredom is important. It’s where creativity begins. It’s the quiet space where a child learns to tolerate discomfort long enough to discover what’s inside them.

My oldest never had that space. I filled it for him. Eventually he had to learn the hard way what stillness can teach.

His intolerance of boredom didn’t stay manageable. As he grew older, it collided with life events in painful and sometimes tragic ways. The plane crash that killed five members of our family, followed by the isolation of COVID, left him without the emotional scaffolding he needed. When everything shut down, his world collapsed overnight.

All the activities that filled his days disappeared. There was no musical theater, no piano lessons, no volunteering in the elementary school classroom. Model UN and martial arts were gone. Every structure that kept him tethered vanished. What took their place was a level of isolation and boredom he’d never experienced. And he had no capacity for it.

What came next is more than I can capture in a single reflection. My son filled the empty space with rebellion, risk, and emotional turmoil that eventually brought all of us to our knees. After a year more difficult than I can describe, my husband and I made the impossible decision to send our fifteen-year-old to three months of wilderness therapy, followed by ten months at a residential treatment center.

Wilderness stripped him of every vice he had. Every activity, every relationship, every substance, every screen. It took everything away except himself. And in that stripped-down place, he finally learned the lessons I hadn’t known how to teach.

Within his first three weeks, each member of his team completed what were called three-day solos. Although a staff member remained within sight, the students were left entirely on their own for seventy-two hours. No company. No help. No distraction. Just themselves, the desert, and time.

My son tells me it was the most gut-wrenching experience of his life, but also the most transformative. When he was assigned a second three-day solo at the end of his stay, he felt no fear. He built his own fire with no tools, cooked his own food, set up his own shelter, and kept his mind occupied. I don’t think he’d say it was the most fun he ever had, but he’d absolutely tell you that no experience has taught him more.

Four years out from wilderness, my son is thriving. He still doesn’t love being bored, but he can tolerate it and he sees the benefit of it. Last summer he asked if we’d support him in attending a six-day backpacking trip led by the same guide who worked with him years earlier. Three of those days were a solo expedition. He chose to do it because he was ready to grow again.

And here’s where my middle son comes back. The same childhood I gave both boys landed differently for each of them. My middle child never struggled with stillness the way his brother did. He could tolerate boredom from the start, which meant my tendency to keep us busy didn’t impact his development in the same way. The truth is that temperament mattered. ADHD mattered. My parenting undeniably played a part, but it was never the whole story.

Thirteen years after my oldest was born, my husband and I had a third son. He’s six years old now. We do things differently. We move slow. We do less. And we let him struggle. When he tells me he’s bored, I say, “Oh good. I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

Because now I understand that boredom isn’t a problem to solve. It’s an invitation. It asks us to sit still, to tolerate discomfort, and to trust that something will emerge in the quiet. Children aren’t born knowing how to do this. Some may be better at it than others, but all can learn by struggling through it. I used to fear boredom for my children. Now I see it as one of the most generous teachers we have, even if I still hate being in her classroom.