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The Children's Collection · The why

Why boredom matters for kids

A research-backed parent's guide. The studies are real. The conclusions are honest.

A note before we start. This is research- informed reflection for thinking parents, not medical or psychological advice. If you are worried about your child's development, mood, or attention, please speak to your GP, health visitor, or a qualified child psychologist. Boredom is not a substitute for clinical care.

The question

When a child says “I'm bored,” many parents reach instinctively for a solution. A screen. A list of suggestions. A craft kit. A toy. The interruption of the boredom feels like the parental job.

A growing body of research suggests that this instinct, however loving, may be getting in the way of something children need to develop. Not in a vague way. In a measurable, repeatedly-replicated, peer-reviewed way.

The research is not new, and it is not controversial. It is, however, surprising, if you have not encountered it before. This is a short summary of what the evidence says.

What boredom actually is, in a child

Boredom is not the absence of activity. It is a specific cognitive state in which the mind, given no external input, turns inward and begins to generate its own. Neuroscientists call the underlying brain system the default mode network, and it is most active precisely when the mind is unoccupied[1].

In children, the default mode network is still developing. The neuroscientist Damien Fair and colleagues showed in a 2008 study that the default network in children is structurally different from the adult version and continues to mature into adolescence[2]. The conditions under which this maturation happens are, broadly, the conditions of unstructured wakeful time. Children who get those conditions develop the network more fully. Children who do not, do not.

This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable thing happening in a brain that is being built.

The Belton finding

Dr Teresa Belton, then at the University of East Anglia, spent years interviewing creative adults about their childhoods. She wanted to understand where their creativity came from. The finding she kept hearing, in slightly different words, from novelists, scientists, and artists, was that they had been allowed to be bored as children[3].

“Boredom,” Belton has said, “is crucial for developing ‘internal stimulus’, which then allows true creativity.” She argues that children need long periods of unstructured time, including time when they are bored, in order to develop the capacity for original thought[4].

Lyn Fry, the educational psychologist, makes a related point in clinical practice. Children who are routinely rescued from boredom never develop the skill of resolving it themselves. The skill of resolving it themselves is the skill of self-direction. Self-direction is one of the most reliable predictors of long-term wellbeing in adulthood[5].

What changed in childhood

For most of the twentieth century, childhood in the UK and US contained a substantial amount of unstructured time. Hofferth and Sandberg at the University of Michigan ran a large-scale time-use study comparing children's discretionary time in 1981 with 1997[6]. They found that, in just sixteen years, children's free unstructured time had decreased by approximately 12 hours per week. The decrease was driven by more time in school, more structured activities, and more time in front of screens.

Since 1997, the decrease has accelerated. Common Sense Media's most recent large-scale survey of US 8-to-12-year-olds found an average of 5 hours and 33 minutes a day of screen-based entertainment, before any homework or schoolwork is added[7]. UK figures from Ofcom show comparable patterns[8].

The maths is uncomfortable but worth doing. If a child sleeps for 10 hours and is at school for 7, they have 7 waking hours left in a day. If 5 of those are on a screen, the unstructured non-screen time available is approximately 2 hours, most of which goes to meals and transitions. The boredom-shaped windows in which the default mode network used to do its developmental work have been substantially closed.

The play research

The psychologist Peter Gray at Boston College has spent two decades documenting the decline of free play and what he calls its consequences for children. His 2013 book Free to Learn compiles the evidence in detail. Children who engage in regular self-directed free play, including the bored portions of it, show better outcomes on multiple measures of mental health, self-regulation, and creativity than children who do not[9].

Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, makes a similar argument from a different angle. Brown studied homicidal young men in the 1960s and found that play deprivation was one of the most consistent features of their histories[10]. Play matters not because it is fun, although it is. It matters because it is one of the conditions under which the developing brain organises itself.

Boredom, in this framework, is not the opposite of play. It is the doorway to play. A child who is bored, and is not rescued, will, given a few minutes, begin to play. The play they generate from boredom is the most developmentally rich kind, because it is theirs.

Screens are not the only variable

It would be easy to read everything above and conclude “screens are ruining children.” The honest version of the research is more careful.

The 2019 Madigan et al. study in JAMA Pediatrics, which followed over two thousand children, found that higher screen-time at age 2 was associated with lower developmental outcomes at age 3, and so on through subsequent measurements[11]. The relationship is correlational, not strictly causal, and the effect sizes are modest. The American Academy of Pediatrics' current guidance, which is thoughtful, is for limits rather than abstinence[12].

The point of mentioning all this is that the case for child boredom is not anti-screen. It is pro-empty-space. Screens are the most common thing currently filling the empty space, so they tend to come up. But a child whose every spare moment is filled with structured extracurriculars, planned playdates, and organised hobbies is also being denied the boredom-shaped windows in which development happens. The villain, if there is one, is the absence of empty time, not any particular thing filling it.

What this looks like in practice

The practical implication of the research is uncomfortable and also very freeing.

It is that the best thing a parent can do, in many of the small “I'm bored” moments of a child's day, is nothing. Not crisply nothing, not stonily nothing, but warmly nothing. Acknowledge the boredom. Don't propose a solution. Don't hand over a screen. Be in the room. Let the child sit with it. After a few minutes, in almost every case, something will happen. The child will start a game, or pick up an object, or begin a long conversation with themselves, or invent a new rule for the living-room rug.

That something is the practice. It is also one of the most important developmental experiences modern childhood has been quietly stripped of. You can give it back.

Doing this consistently is harder than it sounds. The child will protest. You will feel uncertain. Other parents may judge you. The Children's Collection of packs we publish at Anomaly Mellow is, partly, a small set of tools for making this practice easier. The packs are below.

The packs

Three small printable packs designed around the research above:

See the Children's Collection →

Sources

  1. Raichle ME, MacLeod AM, Snyder AZ, Powers WJ, Gusnard DA, Shulman GL. A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2001;98(2):676-682. The seminal paper identifying the default mode network.
  2. Fair DA, Cohen AL, Dosenbach NUF, et al. The maturing architecture of the brain's default network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2008;105(10):4028-4032.
  3. Belton T, Priyadharshini E. Boredom and schooling: a cross-disciplinary exploration. Cambridge Journal of Education. 2007;37(4):579-595.
  4. Belton T, quoted in Richardson H. Children should be allowed to get bored, expert says. BBC News, 23 March 2013. Available at bbc.co.uk.
  5. Fry L. Interviewed in Eatough M. The benefits of letting your child be bored. BBC Future, 16 January 2019.
  6. Hofferth SL, Sandberg JF. How American Children Spend Their Time. Journal of Marriage and Family. 2001;63(2):295-308. (Original time-use diaries: 1981 and 1997.)
  7. Rideout V, Peebles A, Mann S, Robb MB. Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021. San Francisco: Common Sense, 2022.
  8. Ofcom. Children and parents: media use and attitudes report. Annual report; most recent edition available at ofcom.org.uk.
  9. Gray P. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books; 2013.
  10. Brown S, Vaughan C. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery; 2009. (Brown's original Texas Tower study referenced therein.)
  11. Madigan S, Browne D, Racine N, Mori C, Tough S. Association Between Screen Time and Children's Performance on a Developmental Screening Test. JAMA Pediatrics. 2019;173(3):244-250.
  12. American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Communications and Media. Media and Young Minds. Pediatrics. 2016;138(5):e20162591. (Current AAP guidance; periodically updated.)

Last updated: May 2026. This is not medical or psychological advice. For concerns about your child's development, please consult a qualified clinician.