The Death of Boredom: Why Kids Are Losing Creativity

The Death of Boredom: Where Did Your Child’s Creativity Go?

In 1994, I watched my son wait 20 minutes for a bus in Southampton. And invent a universe.

There was no smart phone. Just a cold bus stop on Havelock Road (Near the City Center Southampton), a bus shelter on the pavement, and a boy who had to wait.

When the number 2 bus finally came, he wasn’t bored. He told me the stone was a meteor, the bus stop was a spaceship, and he was the captain.

Last winter in 2025, I watched a 9-year-old at a bus stop in Lahore (Pakistan). The bus was 5 minutes late. He tugged his mother’s sleeve: “Mama, I’m bored. Phone?”

From 20 minutes to 5 minutes.  Same waiting. What disappeared?

I call it The Gap — that quiet, slightly uncomfortable space between wanting something and getting it. Boredom lived there. So did imagination. Now, AI fills it before your child even feels it.

If you only have 1 minute, read this:

Your child’s best ideas don’t come when they are watching something. They come when they are watching nothing. Every time we hand them a screen the second they sigh, we close the little workshop in their brain where creativity is built. The fix is not more activities. It’s protecting 15 minutes of doing nothing.

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Boredom Is Not Empty. It’s a Workshop.

When your child stares out the car window doing “nothing,” her brain is actually very busy. Neuroscientists call this the Default Mode Network. This network is most active when we are not focused on an external task, and it supports mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, and envisioning the future [Immordino-Yang et al., 2012].

That’s when a child connects a dinosaur to a rocket. That’s where original ideas are born.

Importantly, boredom is not a failure of attention; it is a distinct psychological state that signals the need for something meaningful and can motivate exploration [Danckert & Elpidorou, 2017]. Research on boredom and creativity has found that inducing boredom can subsequently enhance creativity, as boredom allows ideas to incubate and leads to more divergent thinking [Mann & Cadman, 2014; Gasper & Middlewood, 2014].

But the workshop has one rule: it only opens when you are not being fed something new to watch or scroll.

YouTube autoplay, TikTok feed, AI that finishes your sentence — they feed constantly. So constantly, the workshop never gets a chance to open.

We think we are saving our children from boredom. We are saving them from their own ideas.

Key takeaway: We didn’t kill boredom. We killed the mental workshop where original ideas are made.

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How We Accidentally Closed The Gap

Waiting for food: One sigh → we give the phone to avoid a tantrum.

Each time, the child practices one less minute of inventing something out of nothing.

Try Tonight: The 15-Minute Bored Jar

Don’t announce a big parenting plan. Make it a game.

1. Take a small jar. Put it on the kitchen counter.
2. Say: “From 7:00 to 7:15, this is Bored Time. No screen. No toy I give you. You can be bored. That’s the whole job.”
3. The first day, they will complain for 10 minutes. Let them. Don’t rescue.
4. On day 3, watch what happens. A pillow becomes a fort. A spoon becomes a mic.

Write what they invent on a small chit and put it in the jar. In a month, open the jar together. You will see creativity coming back.

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A Final Thought From Our Home

Dr. Shaheen Pasha always says after 35 years in special education: “A child who can tolerate boredom can create a world. A child who cannot, will always need someone else to entertain him.”

That world is what AI can never build for them.

What About You?

What did your child invent the last time you let them be truly bored? Share your Bored Jar story in the comments below. We read every single one.

Up Next: The Death of Struggle: Why Instant Answers Are Killing Persistence

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References

Danckert, J., & Elpidorou, A. (2017). In search of boredom: Beyond a functional account. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(5), 324–326.

Gasper, K., & Middlewood, B. L. (2014). Approaching more novel thoughts: Understanding why elation and boredom promote associative thought more than distress and relaxation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 50–57.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., & Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain’s default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352–364.

Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.