Hours and hours of board games. Eternal afternoons in the park. Comb dolls, walk dolls, dress dolls. Constructions, balls, Legos, drawings. Songs that are repeated over and over again: “La vaca Lola, la vaca Lola.” When asked if he sometimes gets bored with his children, Ricardo, a father of two children, answers without hesitation: “Yes, quite a bit. Although it is difficult for me to admit it, I would say that almost every day I end up saturated with repeating the same things over and over again. “We look like a broken record,” he jokes.
Like Ricardo, many fathers and mothers may feel tedium or boredom when spending long hours with their young children. It is something that Florencia Sichel, philosopher and educator at the University of Buenos Aires, has reflected on. “I wonder why if we can get bored with our work, with thinking about what to have for dinner every night, with our partners, we can’t also get bored with raising our sons and daughters. Like any task, just as it has great moments of enjoyment, it can also be boring,” he says.
Sichel invites us to accept that state and not feel guilty for being bored: “This does not mean that we do not love them, but it has to do with the enormous work that caring for another person entails. That it is difficult for us to accept it, and even recognize it out loud, is another issue and has to do with how idealized parenting is,” argues the expert.
Psychologist Diana Crego, who is part of My Perinatal Tribe. “Yes, it is normal that within all the hours we spend with our little ones, taking part in very repetitive games, there are moments when we get bored,” he explains. “Sometimes that makes us feel guilty because there are a lot of demands with motherhood. We believe that we have to enjoy every moment we spend with our children, that we should like all the games they offer us and that we should always be happy, motivated and willing.” However, reality is not like that: “Not everything motivates us nor do we have the same energy every day,” says Crego.
For Clara, mother of a five-year-old girl, the worst are the afternoons in the park. “I take her because, being an only child, I know that it is her way of socializing, but I don’t like going at all. There are hours and hours in which I get very bored,” he explains. In his case he does not feel guilty, but he does recognize some discomfort. “I think it’s normal that mothers don’t have fun in a park, it doesn’t make me feel guilty. The only thing I sometimes think is that maybe, when the day comes when she gets tired of going to the park, maybe I will remember it with nostalgia.” His trick to get through the hours on slides and swings is to put on some headphones and listen to the podcasts he likes the most.
Blanca is the mother of a five-year-old boy and a one-and-a-half-year-old baby. Because of their age difference, it is difficult for them to entertain each other and the activities they propose do not always work for both of them. So Blanca admits that she often ends up bored. “My husband and I split up and each one plays with one; We do everything: board games, crafts… But there comes a time when we can’t take it anymore, it’s horrible, and then we abuse the TV.” In her family – as in many others – this happens especially during school vacation periods, when children spend more time at home. “This last Christmas it happened to us: we were in the town, very cold, so we could barely go out. So there have been hours and hours of inventing things and ending up very tired, drawing on cartoons,” he admits.
That it is difficult for us to accept it, and even recognize it out loud, is another issue and has to do with how idealized parenting is.
Florence Sichel
— philosopher and educator
For Blanca, it is important to de-dramatize this situation and understand that it is okay to be bored: “With our current pace of life, we convey to children the idea that in life we have to do many different things, when that is not the case. You have to leave room for boredom, it’s okay to do nothing,” he reflects.
The importance of being bored
Sichel explains that low tolerance for boredom begins in adults. “The first ones who get along badly with boredom are the adults themselves. Doing nothing is unbearable for us. We are terrified that childhoods get bored because it happens to us too with our own free time. It seems that everything is urgent and that we are always doing important things, although most of the time none of that happens,” says the philosopher.
By transferring this to boys and girls, we deny the possibility of having time to do nothing. For perinatal psychologist Diana Crego, it is important to make room for the lack of activities. “Allowing ourselves to feel bored is normalizing that perhaps there are activities with which we connect a lot and others, well, not so much. And that’s okay, it’s human. At the same time, letting our little ones get bored is a wonderful way to encourage creativity, look for alternatives and see what resources are available to create or look for a new stimulating activity,” says the expert.
For Clara, mother of a five-year-old girl, the worst are the afternoons in the park: ‘I take her because, being an only child, I know that it is her way of socializing, but I don’t like going at all. There are hours and hours in which I get very bored
Another option is to look for things that we like more to share with our sons and daughters. This is what Lucía, a mother of two, does, who recognizes that playtime and park hours especially bother her. “I try to spend time with them doing other things that bore me less, like walking, running errands or just lying around chatting. To play, I try to make them as autonomous as possible, because that is what bores me the most of all,” he says.
Sichel claims this tedium as something normal and even desirable. “Far from looking for the formula to overcome boredom, perhaps we have to become friends and realize that being bored is part of life. Recover boredom as a way to make room for invention, free time, and unproductivity. To the next ‘I’m bored’ from our children, perhaps we can respond: ‘Me too,’ he concludes.
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