Boredom jar ideas: 40 prompts for kids (and why they work)

If you’ve searched “boredom jar ideas,” you already have the instinct right: instead of solving your child’s boredom for them, you want to give them a small nudge and let them solve it themselves. That’s the whole value of a boredom jar, and it’s quietly backed by a good deal of child-development research.

Below are 40 prompts you can write onto scraps of paper and drop in a jar today. But first, two minutes on what makes a boredom jar work, because the kind of prompt matters more than the jar.

Why a boredom jar beats handing over a screen

When a child says “I’m bored”, the easy move is to hand them a tablet. The boredom jar is the harder, better move, and here’s the reasoning.

Boredom is an uncomfortable feeling with a purpose: it’s the brain’s prompt to start generating its own ideas. In children, the system that does this, the default mode network, is still developing, and the conditions it needs are exactly the conditions of unstructured, slightly-bored time.^[3] Children who get that time develop the capacity for self-directed play and original thought. Children who are rescued from every bored moment get less practice at it.

The researcher Teresa Belton, interviewing creative adults about their childhoods, found that being allowed to be bored kept coming up as a common thread.^[1] And the psychologist Peter Gray has spent decades documenting how self-directed free play, the kind that grows out of boredom, builds self-regulation and problem-solving in ways adult-directed activities don’t.^[2]

A boredom jar works because it sits in the middle: it doesn’t rescue the child, but it doesn’t abandon them either. It hands the boredom back with a tiny push.

How to make the prompts work

• Keep them open-ended. “Build something out of cardboard” beats “make a specific craft”. The vaguer prompt sends the child into their own invention.
• No screens in disguise. “Watch a documentary” is not a boredom-jar prompt.
• Low prep. If a prompt needs you to set up for twenty minutes, it defeats the point.
• Don’t ask how it went. The play is theirs. Reporting back to you makes it a task.

40 boredom jar prompts

Make something

1. Build a den somewhere new
2. Make something out of cardboard and tape
3. Build the tallest tower you can, then knock it down
4. Invent a board game and teach someone the rules
5. Make a tiny museum on a windowsill
6. Draw a map of your home or garden
7. Make a comic strip about your day
8. Build a marble run out of anything
9. Make a paper aeroplane and test three designs
10. Create a treasure hunt for someone else

Use your body 11. Invent a new dance and perform it 12. See how long you can balance on one leg 13. Make an obstacle course in the garden or hallway 14. Have a slow-motion race across the room 15. Learn to do a cartwheel (or try) 16. Make up a secret handshake and practise it 17. Hop everywhere for the next ten minutes

Go outside 18. Find five different leaves and press them 19. Make a stick into something else 20. Watch the clouds and name their shapes 21. Build something out of stones or sticks 22. Look for the smallest creature you can find 23. Walk a familiar route and spot five new things 24. Make a nature collection

Use your imagination 25. Make up a story and tell it out loud 26. Invent a new word and use it ten times today 27. Pretend you’ve arrived from another planet and describe your home 28. Write a letter to your future self 29. Design an animal that doesn’t exist and name it 30. Be a detective and “investigate” one room

Quiet things 31. Read in the most unusual spot in the house 32. Draw the view from a window 33. Teach yourself to whistle, click, or wink 34. Make a list of your top ten anything 35. Write or draw in a notebook for ten minutes 36. Look closely at one small object for two whole minutes

Help and tidy 37. Reorganise your bookshelf however you like 38. Sort your toys into “keep” and “pass on” 39. Do one kind thing for someone without being asked 40. Plant a seed from something you ate

The shortcut

If you’d rather not cut up forty scraps of paper, the studio makes a ready-printed version, The Bored Box, with 30 open-ended cards plus a one-page parent’s note on the research above. There’s also a Summer Boredom Manifesto for the long holidays. But a real jar with your own scraps works perfectly. The jar was never the point. The point is the small, daily decision not to rescue, and to trust that the bored child in front of you knows what to do, given the chance.