It's Okay to Be Bored and other lessons in the pit

While other kids here age were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, my daughter was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, sitting in a hole in the ground in a field.  Today was the inaugural family goose hunt.  Something tells me this will be the first of many mornings spent in a pit.

Wyokiddo is too young to hunt.  At just five years old, she doesn’t fully understand the lethality of a firearm.  And until she grasps that concept, she’s riding shotgun, not shooting one.  But there is still much she can learn from a morning spent hunting, from her responsibility as a meat eater to firearm safety.  She also get to interact with adults other than her parents and teachers, experience boredom and enjoy a few hours unplugged with her family.

Yes, she was bored.  And that’s a good thing.

Let me backtrack a bit.

One of my 2018 resolutions was to read a book a week.  One of the books I picked up at our local library was “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom’s Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids.”  It’s written by Linda Akeson McGurk, a woman who grew up in Sweeden, emigrated to the United States and spent six months with her kids in her homeland.

The book focuses on McGurk’s attempts to raise her kids with the laid-back, outdoor-centered lifestyle more common in Sweeden than in the United States.  I think I read the entire book in two days, it resonated with me so much.  I loved it so much, I told Outdoor Guy if we ever have to leave the country, we’re moving to Scandinavia, I am so in love with their attitudes toward parenting, schooling and environmentalism.

Without going into details, or spoiling the book for you if you’re interested in reading it (and I suggest you should!), I was motivated to adopt several philosophies prevalent in this book.  Not least among those ideas is that kids need to be bored.

Like so many parents, I often fall into the trap of feeling like I have to entertain my child or occupy every minute of her day.  But the more I learn about child development, the more I realize I’m doing her a disservice by providing her with constant stimulation.  Kids benefit from boredom.  It stimulates their imaginations and forces them to make decisions on how to manage their time

“Why? Children need to sit in their own boredom for the world to become quiet enough that they can hear themselves. It is only when we are surrounded by nothing that something comes alive on the inside,” says Dr. Vanessa LaPointe, a psychologist and frequent columnist.

Reading McGurks ideas on how kids benefit from boredom made sense.  Why would Wyokiddo ever get creative and use her imagination her parents are constantly providing her ideas or stimulation?  How can she come up with great ideas or dream about what is possible when I’m the constant voice in her head?

My mom was never one to indulge my boredom, either.  Not because she understood the benefits of boredom, but because that was just how people parented 30 years ago.  She bought me toys, she bought me crayons and scissors.  How I used them was up to me.  I filled those quiet times thinking up stories, writing and illustrating my own books and inventing amazing pedigrees for my plastic horses.

Fast forward 30 years and I still fill the quiet times of my life writing stories and enjoying artistic pursuits.  Coincidence?  Probably not.  Would I be who I am today if I had a TV or an iPod to constantly entertain me?  Who knows.

But I’ve decided to let Wyokiddo be bored.  Yes, I still play with her.  We do arts and crafts and play soccer in the hallway.  But now when she asks what she can do, I feel no guilt when I say “That’s entirely up to you!  Find something to do!”

Today, in the goose pit, I know Wyokiddo was bored.  We were underground with no room to run around.  There wasn’t a lot to look at and the conversation was generally focused on grownup things.  But she occupied her time blowing on the duck call, singing songs to herself, counting the different objects in the pit and asking questions.  Sometimes she just sat quiet, her little eyes drinking it all in. She and I took some time to talk about why we hunt.

“So there are lots and lots of geese, Mama?”

“Yes.  So many that if we didn’t hunt, they’d eat each other’s food and they’d run out of food and habitat.”

“So hunters help ALL the geese by shooting some of the geese?” she asked, very seriously.

“Exactly!”

“And we’ll get to eat some.  Just like we eat chicken or pheasant.  It’s meat for our bodies,” she told me.

I love these kinds of conversations, because it shows me her mind is growing and starting to understand concepts like conservation.  But we can’t have those conversations if we can’t carve out some time to be quiet and unplugged.  Even bored.

It’s a work in progress.  Sometimes I relent and let her watch tv or play my phone.  But as the year goes on, I’m remembering more to embrace the boredom, in the pit, after school and on the road.

–Teresa