The Death of Boredom

I walk back to the rec room in our house. I call it the cave. It is inhabited with the various electronic pacifiers that we as good and enlightened parents provide our growing children. I don't know how many times my wife or I have said something to the effect of, "these kids are lucky; I didn't have any of these things when I was growing up." Now I'm not so sure, about their being lucky that is. But hold that thought. I enter the rec room knowing I will find at least one of our children attached to a video game or the computer on-line or watching TV. This time it's my oldest son (we'll call him Mitch) and his sister, he's playing she's watching him play.

He doesn't look up but senses my presence; the force is strong with this one. "I'm hungry, are we going out to eat?" Going out to eat with the family is one of the central events in Mitch's life. Actually, any activity organized by and involving his parents is a tie for most important event. He's not alone. At any given time when they are not in school, at least a couple of our five children are can be found biding their time waiting for the next parent sponsored event to save them from their bored misery. To fill the emptiness between these seminal events, they turn not to the outside world or their imaginations but to their electronic friends.

I inform Mitch that we are not eating out, we're having Chinese delivered. Having dashed his hopes of dining out he returns to his game, manipulating his controller with such a vengeance he is in serious danger of exerting himself. I look around at the TV screen to see what's captivating him so. I see his character pulling another character out of his car, whereupon he blows his head off and jumps in the poor guys' car and careens off down the road running down pedestrians in his path. Every parental bone in my body says this is wrong. That nothing good could possibly come from this rot and that if I was one tenth the father that Ward Cleaver was I would pull the plugs from the wall and send the Beav to his room where he could talk it out with Wally. I slowly back out the door closing it behind me - Ward wherever you are, please forgive me.

This is not a cautionary tale of the evils of the violence and sex that our children are deluged with on a daily basis, that's a different article. What we're talking about here, is the creative power of boredom and how in our attempts to save our children from the clutches of boredom we may be robbing them as well.

I know that of the snippets of memory that I have of my childhood most of those moments were born out of what I did to alleviate my boredom. Such as the Fort that I built when I was about ten. I used scrap wood my father had stacked up near the garage and when I told him about my plans he said something to the effect of "don't loose my tools." My vision of this fort included multiple rooms that would house meetings of my friends along with some living quarters. The reality of the completed project was a three foot square box of wood with a doorway about tall enough to fit a ten year old, not much more. My efforts consumed all of my after school hours for the better part of a week. Somewhere my Mother has a photo of me standing proudly next to this monument to my perseverance.

Later, when I was perhaps twelve or thirteen, the call of the open road beckoned me. Having shed my "little guy" bike for something more substantial with multiple speeds and knobby tires, my travels were no longer confined to my own block. Constant parental supervision was no longer a yoke around my neck; I had passed that mantel down to my little brother. Nope, my only confines were to be home before dark. My best friend at the time Dave and I were sitting on my front porch one summer morning with nothing but hours and hours of hot sunny summer day stretching out before us. I'm guessing this was later in the summer because the usual outlets of playing ball or riding up to the community pool were starting to loose their appeal. We were bored and itching for something else.

Fueled with this itchy feeling we decided to strike out on an epic journey. With our bikes, a couple dollars and our water bottles we set out to travel as far as we could and still make it back. We peddled for hours, past neighborhoods we'd never seen. We crossed a river over a tall bridge that scared me to death, into the country with fields populated with actual cows. Being suburban boys, anyplace with cows represented a significant journey. We marveled to each other several times along the way, "can you believe how far we've gone, has anybody ever done this?" Later that night we recounted our journey to my folks, my recollection was they were impressed. Putting myself in their place now, I have to admit that impressed would come somewhere down the list, somewhere behind mortified and infuriated.

Several years later, this same friend of mine and I were faced with the prospect of too much time on our hands as school let out for the summer. Our boredom drove us literally across country in an epic journey of discovery that covered six weeks and thirteen states.

I could continue on here waxing nostalgic on the memories of my youth, but I think I've made my point. I tell you these tales only to illustrate how the potent mix of time and boredom and youth can yield creativity and fun and maybe even lasting memories. I'm a father now and I find myself constantly striving to create memories for my own children. I think that the family memories that we have created for our children have far surpassed what my parents provided me. But if I were to confront them with this boast I'm sure it would be met with a shrug. I'm quite convinced that they never saw it as their job. Holidays, birthdays a family vacation once a year, outside of that you were on your own. I wanted to do it different, better with my kids, and in some respects I think I have.

I get a sense of sadness though, when I see my children completely unable to break out of their own ruts and how they turn instinctively to their computers and video games and TV in order to sooth themselves. My sadness turns to action, not their action mind you, but mine. I will rescue them from their boredom because the poor things can't rescue themselves.

Of course I didn't create this world my kids are growing up in that's so very different than the one that I knew. In fact, I don't think that any generation of parent has ever had to contend with raising children in a world that is as drastically different than the world they knew, than today's parents are faced with. Is this a cop out? Probably, but if it is, it's a good one. I'm not the one who has come up with the never ending stream of video games, movies, chat rooms, websites, MTV reality shows et al. that seek to cover over boredom if not actually remove it. OK, I am the one who buy's it for them, but let's not get hung up in semantics.

I only hope that our children are developing their own sense of creativity when it comes to coping with boredom. I hope they create their own adventures that take them to actual destinations outside of cyberspace. I hope that their memories are self made and don't include recounting playing this game where he pulled this guy out of his car and "blew the dudes head off", because if this is one of the only memories they have to draw on, I'm afraid chances are he'll be tripping down memory lane from a jail cell.