Boredom
It seems children these days expect to be constantly entertained. With the introduction of handheld screen
devices, they are just as addicted to the endless stream of information as we
are as adults. The downtime, the doing
nothing, watching nothing, and learning to fill their time with innovative play
is a dying concept. It concerns me that
children are consuming all the noise of today without any silence. Silence, a time to reflect and think on one’s
own without a bombardment of outside distractions is essential. Boredom fosters imagination and innovation. The silence they would call boredom is
actually good for them. Children of
today don’t need to be scheduled with an abundance of activities to fill idle
time. Rather, they need downtime to just be.
I remember as a child being bored. I remember how my mother
would remedy the situation if I complained I was bored. She would assign me a list of chores to help
me with my boredom. This solved the problem
of expressing boredom in our household.
You don’t have anything to do?
Okay, I’ll give you something to do.
This boredom was especially extreme when I was at my grandmother’s house
for a week in the summertime and even more so on Sundays there. We weren’t allowed to do certain things on
Sunday; mostly it was reserved for worshiping, eating, and visiting with
others. I remember when my grandmother
taught me how to crochet. I was consumed
with it and spent a lot of time during the weekdays making a large round
cushion cover. On Sunday, however, she
did not allow me to crochet or watch tv.
We were city children and I often could read from her facial expressions
that she considered us lazy and underfoot.
She was raised on hard work and farm chores from an early age. As teens, we would sleep too late for her
liking, want to take a bath everyday and complain about what she considered our
pampered life. She did not allow us to bathe
every day. If we wanted to wash our hair,
we could choose to dunk our heads into the rain barrel, shampoo and rinse. I must admit, rainwater was extremely soft and
worked wonderfully for hair washing. On
bath days, mostly just Saturday, she only allowed us to put an inch or two of
water in the bathtub, and there was no shower.
Nothing was wasted and especially not water. She raised her children during the Depression
and did not part from her conservative ways.
We would watch her work sunup to sundown and as I look back,
we weren’t of much help to her. I remember
going with her to the barn when she milked the cow in the evening and watched
her slop the hogs in the pen. I was
mostly scared of the cattle in the pasture.
We did help her water her flowerbeds which she was so particular
with. We dipped an empty one-gallon paint
bucket into the rain barrel and carried bucketfuls to the flowers she pointed
out to us. We could not help her weed
the flowers as we weren’t trusted to know the difference between plants and
weeds. We watched her do the laundry out
in the garage, separate from the house, with a wringer washer which we weren’t
allowed to touch. Then we watched her hang
all the clothes on the clotheslines.
Again, no help as we were too short to reach the line. I might have handed her a clothespin a time or
two. I remember just how stiff the bath
towels always were; they were like boards after drying in the sun. We watched her make biscuits from scratch
everyday and cook a hot lunch for us while always wearing an apron. My grandfather, a carpenter, would come home
for lunch. She gathered vegetables from
the garden and prepared meals that were never fully appreciated by us at the
time. We helped her pick up apples from around
the apple tree and watched her carefully peel them, wasting none of them, by
cutting out all of the bruises. We watched
her break string beans and shuck corn. All
the scraps would go to the hogs. She always made me my favorite macaroni and
cheese and/or blackberry cobbler. We
picked the blackberries together down in the pasture field. The food we had for lunch was carefully
placed in an empty kitchen cupboard after lunch and brought out for supper but
not reheated.
Yes, we were bored.
We wanted to watch television, which she limited. We wanted to sit directly in front of the box
fan because we were accustomed to air-conditioning and she had none. It got hot in her house during July, so we
complained. We were city children, not
accustomed to the simpler way of life.
In a way, we were just like the children of today. We wanted to be entertained. Oh, but to look back and see that we were so
fortunate to be bored. We experienced a
new way of life that was only a glimpse into our mother’s upbringing. The difference was she was expected to work
alongside her mother while we were mere onlookers. We mostly played jacks on the back porch,
guessed car colors coming over the horizon from the porch swing and climbed
trees to discover baby birds in a nest. We
colored coloring books and drew pictures.
We played with the only “toy” my grandmother kept at her house, Tinker Toys. We weren’t nearly as bored as we claimed to
be.
Sometimes I just feel that in today’s society, children are
missing out on the boring days of summer.
If they are in the house all day staring at a screen while playing computer
games or watching television, they miss out on the truly incredible time of
being a child. They need to be bored,
really bored. Only then will they know
what they can imagine.
Tammy Harvey
2/28/2026
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