What To Do When Your Child Says, "I'm Bored"!

0:00 - My name's Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, and I'm joined today by-- - Maggie Dent. - And we wanna talk with you a little bit about boredom, and why boredom is something that we really need to make room for in the raising up of our littles. - It is really interesting, isn't it, that when we see our children struggle with certain things, we want to fix them, and this is a biggie. When your kids come and say, "I'm bored," there's a part of us that thinks, "Oh my God, I need to entertain them "or give them something right now "that means they don't have to experience this."

0:34 And I'm going to let you in on a tiny winy secret, is that their brain is already working at how to fix that. That's a state the brain finds a little antagonistic, so it's already triggering, about to trigger, the opposite to boredom. So again, I want you to really breathe deep into that. My trick around that, and this is the mean old mom I was, was I'd say, "Oh, great! "Look, I've got a list of chores, "let me know which one you'd like to do."

1:01 Funny how the boredom went away so fast. - Magic, magic. And I really think that children, in the world that we live in today, it's so fast-paced, and there's so many stresses and pressures put on parents, put on our children, they gotta learn, they gotta do this, they gotta meet milestones, all of these kinds of things, and really, it's our job to protect their childhood. And so creating a space for boredom is a beautiful gift that you can give to your children.

1:28 You don't need to be entertaining them constantly. You don't need to have them in extracurricular activities constantly. We can take a little bit of a back seat, and just let nature find its way through with all of that. In fact, it's my belief that children need their world to be quiet enough that they can hear themselves. And when they can hear themselves, they get to, kind of from an inside place, honor who they are. And magical things will come out of that.

1:55 And so when my boys would come to me, and say, "Mom, I'm bored," I used to always just reply, "I love bored." And say nothing else. And then they would know, oh, there's no entertainment forthcoming, and off they would go to find themselves. It's how one of my children discovered the world of music, and has this profound passion for music and playing the guitar. It's how they become their own person. And so let your children be bored.

2:25 It's a beautiful, beautiful gift that you can offer them as a big person. - It can be the pause before the most creative moment in not only your children's lives, but your life. Pause, merge into it, and see what comes next. - Magic. Let them be bored.