I don't remember being over scheduled as a child. In fact, I don't remember ever having my time scheduled for me by my mother or anyone else for that matter. Other than the chunks of time given over to school, meals, sleep and perhaps a random sports practice, I had no obligations as a child. Time was a fluid concept. Sometimes it passed in the blink of an eye, sometimes it crept at an interminably slow pace. More often than not, I was responsible for filling it.
My parents along with my friends' parents had this novel idea a few decades back. It was called, "I don't care if you're bored, get your ass outside and amuse yourself." Today, this might fall under the parlance of "unstructured play." As you know, everything these days requires some sort of nomenclature. How else are we to wrap our heads around the concept?
Dealing with boredom seemed to be part and parcel of growing up. Now it just strikes fear into the hearts of parents everywhere. I recall meeting a woman at a wedding last summer who spent the better part of our tortuous conversation filling me in on every over scheduled moment of her children's summer vacation. One week to Latin camp, two weeks at band camp, a week at home to partake in some sort of culinary day camp, and on and on until the weeks had been filled and little Mary and Susie had been inundated with so much highly supervised entertainment that if left to their own devices for more than twenty minutes they might very well have had a complete and utter breakdown not knowing what to do with themselves.
It all sounded a bit overwhelming to me. When she told me about the fact that she had nothing planned for the last week of the summer and it was inducing heart palpitations in her as early as June, I mentioned to her that perhaps her children might benefit from having to come up with some things to do on their own. She looked at me as if I had been speaking a foreign language or had drank one too many cheap glasses of wine since the reception had started.
I have memories of spending countless hours swimming in the pool during the summer. Eventually, when I would get bored, my father would suggest I dive for leaves at five cents a pop. This had the dual effect of getting a cleaned pool bottom at slave labor prices and keeping me occupied until I was too tired to complain any longer. If that wasn't enough, I had a bike and two legs to move it around the neighborhood. Or, if I couldn't find anything to do outside, my mother would tell me to go open a book. Those were the days when we actually made weekly trips to the library and knew what it meant to handle something used.
Watching my friend's kids at the beach by the lake the other day made me realize that the art of play has yet to go the way of the dinosaurs. While my friend and I talked, her seven year old daughter had no problem devising a plan to create a series of mini tidal pools each decked out with their own bits of lake flora for decoration. The four year old boy quite happily spent his time picking up wads of sand and throwing them into the water thereby simultaneously entertaining himself and their golden retriever with the idea that there might be something worth chasing every other thirty seconds. While somewhat mindless, no one complained. In fact, I lost interest well before the children did.
I contend learning how to cope with being bored is a critical life lesson much like learning how to get along with various types of people or how to successfully integrate horizontal stripes into one's wardrobe without either looking like a sailor or worse, a sailor who looks like he's packed away one too many cheeseburgers. Only after you have been sucked into the depths of boredom and figured out how to claw your way out do you fully appreciate the skills necessary to handle the vagaries of adult life.
I worry for society in the next fifteen to twenty years. Never having had to master the art of daydreaming, how will anyone in the future be able to make it through such things as a cocktail party, dead end job or G8 Meeting? A little bit of boredom has its benefits. The alternative is a legion of people who have no idea how to be productive on their own or amuse themselves.
Luckily, I grew up with parents not afraid to let me get bored. Otherwise, I'd have lost my sanity a long time ago during all those rounds of golf and innings of baseball my husband watches on the television. Take it from me, boredom can be a very good thing.
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