SCHOOL’S out, the sun is shining and, for five to 16-year-olds, this is the most boring week of the year. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids! It is at this point of the summer holidays that children are said to reach peak boredom levels. In a study of 1,200 parents of school age children, most said the novelty of the long break wears off just two weeks in.
As a child, six whole weeks of summer, stretched ahead like eternity, was a delicious thing to savour. No school till September! They were great, those long days of playing out and messing about, and not really doing anything in particular. Inevitably, boredom set in, but that didn’t matter.
Whingeing about it certainly wasn’t tolerated. “I’m bored!” we’d wail. “I’m Mum.
How do you do?” came the nonchalant response. Our mothers didn’t care if we were bored, as long as we were out from under their feet until tea-time. There seems to be an endless smorgasbord of summer holiday activities for today’s children.
Every day I get press releases about nature trails, mini fun runs, face-painting drop-ins, geocaching challenges, eco-crafts workshops - there’s so much ‘family fun’ around now, kids just don’t have time to be bored. And that’s a shame. Because it’s okay to be bored.
Being a child of the Seventies, I had boredom down to a fine art. In the summer we’d spend a couple of weeks or so in a caravan or a tent (with the added boredom of long, hot car journeys) and the rest of our six-week mega-br.