This may seem rather cruel - to enjoy the boredom of your children - but there is an amazing thing that happens to a bored kid....they eventually find something to do. It sometimes takes a while. Usually it goes through the common routine of driving me crazy, driving siblings crazy, driving the pets crazy and then...finally, they launch into something completely original and creative. As a parent, it takes a little fortitude to survive through these stages, but the results are often amazing to observe. 
Today, as an example, I was a horrible slug of a parent. Unwilling to even engage my 6 and 7 year old in sorting out their conflicts with one another, I simply listened to their arguments run their course and when I checked in with them this afternoon, the entire table was covered with a mosaic of playing cards to look like a garden and the dominoes had been constructed into some kind of castle. The game that they had devised had rules that only they completely understood, but they were happy as larks to be playing it together. It continued until sometime after dinner (we simply slid it down to one end of the table to allow a place for us to eat) and then they happily picked it all up before bed. At other times I have evicted all of my children from the house to sort out their boredom outside and then watch happily as one of them happens to find a Frisbee and a whole new sort of 'ninja Frisbee-kicking' game is born that eventually involves all five of them in a sort of strange one-on-one-on-three sort of set up with modified two hand touch tackling. 
Periodically, I feel bad keeping my children in the technological dark ages, but then again, all that technology is always going to be out there. Like Pandora's box, it has been released into the world and there is no way to contain it again, so they will have access to it and they will have to learn to use it at some point. Entertainment is easy and always on these days, but boredom....that is harder to come by. There are times when I, myself, get caught in a rut and spend entirely too much time in front of this screen and find my mind slowly dissolving into so much mush. Opinions and news stories are all too prevalent, too dramatic, too polarized. A person hardly has time to think for themselves anymore because they are being told so immediately and constantly what to think by news programs and "experts" who, ironically are employed or paid nicely by whoever or whatever they are advocating.I have been reading a fascinating book by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna which is a historical fiction novel about the time period in the 1930-1950s and deals with such characters as Lev Trotsky, Stalin and the McCarthy era in the US. Her writing is so heartbreakingly beautiful and so thoughtful that there have been times when I simply have to stop and think about what has been said. One of the points that stood out for me is that, at that time of history, the radio was the new media of the day. It was the beginning of the constant barrage of 'the truth as other people see it' in which they would express whatever facts were available, and when the facts weren't readily apparent, they would embellish the truth to fill the air time to avoid a lapse in programming. The whole "Red Communist" scare was mostly a news media fabrication to keep people in a constant state of fear and anxiety and thus listening to the news programing or reading the latest headlines. Not unlike the news programing today. Maybe we should have allowed the lapses and dead air as useful time to think and process what facts were actually available. Maybe we should make time for those lapses now as well. This is one of the main reasons that we avoid technology around here as much as we do. What good has come from it, really? It has made communication easier, but we are so busy with trying to be constantly entertained that we don't effectively communicate with anyone anymore. I love having good debates with people about differing view points - it gets my ire up, but it stretches my thinking, makes me see other sides of the issue, and forces me to state my own opinions as eloquently and succinctly as possible - something the news media doesn't give you a chance to do.
Writing, reading, assimilating, synthesizing and creating something completely new and different are the hallmarks of a populace that can continue to advance. Simply being a sponge and absorbing so much bad news and other people's opinions does not help to make a difference in the world.
And so, at our house, boredom it is. A lapse in entertainment in which the brain actually has to take in information and do something with it, make something of it, learn something from it. When the brain is thought of more along the lines of a muscle,(rather than simply being a bundle of fatty neurons) - it requires work outs to become stronger. And the brain wants and needs things to think about - as evidenced by the way it wanders while we struggle to get to sleep, or the dreams that it comes up with in the middle of the night. But when we sit in front of a television screen or Wii and are being fed a constant diet of cheap entertainment that requires little more than a rudimentary ability to understand the English language and some kind of reflex activity....well, suffice it to say that the mental muscles are not being flexed. It depresses me to see language being obliterated by 'texting'. Beautiful, thoughtful lines of prose reduced down to "lol" or, if it is really good, "lmao". Our world is now being run on information that is being communicated 140 characters at a time. This depresses me. But, as Pandora found Hope in the bottom of her box, I have five kids who never cease to amaze me with their ideas, creativity, energy, and eventual ability to play well together. They are my hope in this crazy, media driven, entertainment seeking, technological world.
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