Only boring people are bored

“I’m bored” – what child now ever has the opportunity to utter words so familiar to the youth of its forebears?  My father was so fed up of hearing me and my sister whine this from the back of the car that he repeatedly although unsuccessfully instituted a 50p fine for every mention of the word.  Only the boring are bored is an admonition that comes back to me from that time.  In truth car journeys in our family were an uncomfortable melange of tedious hours of I Spy and instant frantic demands for navigation as my father would veer off at a congested junction thrusting an extraordinary tome into my hands which claimed to teleport you from junction to junction but instead triggered a terrifying episode of real life Whacky Races.

The point is car journeys were boring as the only entertainment consisted of teasing my sister and asking every 5 minutes if we were nearly there yet.  Now screens in the back shut up the children and the screen in the front tells them exactly how nearly there yet they are.  The annihilation of boredom by screen is by now a well worn trope.  I had my first vivid experience of it when at the age of 25 I did my first evening of baby sitting.  An angelic boy of two was put in my care for an evening and I had preposterously envisaged a jolly couple of hours reading Peter Pan to him.  Instead the moment the door clicked shut behind his parents he started to howl relentlessly in entirely well founded objection to the incompetent interloper.  I tried everything in my power (which in truth back then wasn’t much) before in desperation pressing play on the VHS.  It was as if Thomas the Tank Engine had reincarnated as an opium pipe: instant blissful silence. 

Now that I am a parent the thing that really surprises me about my childhood is that however incessant were my complaints of boredom not once do I recall my parents rebuking me for being boring myself.  This may just be a symptom of heroic self-restraint, it may be basic good manners or it may be a reflection of the 24/7 childcare that I [they] enjoyed.  For the fact of the matter is children are often pretty boring.

Worst of all children are actively boring.  They do not engender the passive boredom of a rainy Sunday afternoon in a house devoid of screen based diversion; the nothing to do boredom of our childhood but now consigned forever to history.  Instead theirs is the tedium of the task that must be tackled.  Contrary to popular wisdom nappy changing is a doddle compared to the more hellish aspects of parenting a small child.  It has a defined beginning and an end.  Compare this to the assured misery of getting a tired baby to sleep.  And in contrast to a boring job or task at work which you couldn’t care less about this boredom is suffused with the guilty feeling that you’re doing it wrong, that you’re failing in some fundamental way.

I want to scotch any suggestion that this is a whinge.  The joys attendant on caring for a child, especially your own, more than compensate for the teeth grinding longeurs.  But I do have a concern that the tolerance for boredom of the parents of the future is being so diminished by screen based entertainment that there could yet be a real crisis in parenting 20 years hence.  Perhaps it is time to bring back boredom?