What to do with a bored child

Transcription:

When our children tell us they're bored, we usually respond with, "Good. Go find something to do." We don't have an obligation as parents to be the cruise director of our children's lives. And so I don't feel pressured at all to give my kids ideas of what to do. I think we're all innately wired to create and to work. The word "bored" honestly didn't come into our vocabulary until the 19th century. Charles Dickens coined it in one of his novels, and so the idea of even being bored is a relatively new concept. And so, if our kids say they're bored, which they almost never do, because they know they are not going to get any information out of us, we either tell them to go find something to do, or we give them a chore to do, and that's their consequence for saying they're bored. I think that being bored is actually a really good thing. i think kids need to understand that life doesn't revolve around them, and that life isn't always "What can I do to have fun?" And honestly, boredom fosters creativity. Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, has said that one of the reasons he is so creative is that his childhood was so boring, and I think that's good advice for all of us as parents. We don't need to feel pressured to give our children exciting lives, because boredom is good.

Video Categories: ALL PARENTS, Family Life, Family Time

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, shares advice for parents on the best way to respond to your child when he or she tells you that they are bored

Transcript

Expert Bio

Tsh Oxenreider

Author & Blogger, SimpleMom.net

Tsh Oxenreider is the full-time blogger behind Simple Mom and the founder and creative director of Simple Living Media, a blog network dedicated to helping people live intentionally (while throwing perfection out the window). She thinks a library card, a Netflix subscription, and a passport are some of the greatest parenting tools in the universe. She’s a wife to Kyle, mama to Tate, Reed, and Finn, and is the author of Organized Simplicity and One Bite at a Time: 52 Bites for Making Life Simpler. She is currently working on her next book. Tsh and her nomadic family currently live in Bend, Oregon, but several dots around the globe have also been called home (her 7-year-old has been on 60 airplanes and counting). Together, they love to travel, read books, go camping, and make homemade pizza for Friday Family Movie Night.

Tsh writes about living simply and intentionally at Simple Mom, which was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2012. She was also number 2 in the top 50 Twitter Moms of 2011, was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2011, her blog was nominated for Best New Blog of 2008, and has been mentioned on Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Parents Magazine, and more. She speaks frequently about blogging, writing, living intentionally, and motherhood in between changing diapers and hitting the 'publish' button. She is also an advocate for Compassion International, serving as one of their bloggers, and is a regular contributor at (in)courage. Tsh also records a podcast with Homefries called The Simple Mom Podcast, which during one week ranked second under NPR’s This American Life in most listened-to podcasts.

Parenting expert on: Parenting Styles, Family Time, Parents with a Purpose, Values

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