Who are you?

Boredom, for an 8-year-old, is an emergency.

For a parent, not so much.

Teresa standing at my side and telling me she’s bored usually leads me to suggest she do her homework. Or pick up her toys. Or even play with some of those toys.

What she wants, I know, is to play with me. Or at least get my attention.

When she walks away, angry that she hasn’t succeeded, I usually feel guilty for not dropping what I’m doing to play with her. So in way, she has succeeded: She is occupying my thoughts.

I generally subscribe to the parenting theory that children need attention more than they need things, and I do think Teresa gets plenty of attention most of the time.

But I also think it’s good for children to experience boredom, to be challenged to figure out ways to amuse themselves, whether by making their dolls into a family to take care of, writing and illustrating a story and making their own books or challenging themselves to cross the living room and dining room without touching the floor. The key is for them to find satisfaction and value in the doing, rather than to do things only for the parental applause that they hope will come with a completed project (or new route from front door to the kitchen without setting foot on the carpet).

I could sound like the caricatures of elders of my youth, who had to walk three miles to school in the snow every day, uphill, both ways, when I point out that parents in 2015 spend almost twice as much time engaging directly with their children than parents did 50 years earlier, according to data from the Pew Research Center. According to the Pew data, mothers spent 10 hours a week in direct child care in 1965 and 15 hours a week in 2015. Fathers increased their hours of child care from 2.5 a week in 1965 to 7 a week in 2015. 

But according to our local 8-year-old, it’s not enough.

“All you care about is your work,” she tells me. “Not about me.”

I don’t think even she believes that’s true, although it probably feels that way when she says it. Children are insatiable sponges for lots of things: knowledge, entertainment, attention. No matter how much the get, they always want more.

Sometimes, I believe, it’s good for them to fall back on their own resources, to entertain themselves with their own imagination.

Maybe waiting 15 or 20 minutes for a parent’s attention is not the same as Jesus spending 40 days in the desert, much less the Israelites spending 40 years in search of the Promised Land. But it has some of the same effect that adults are searching for when we go on retreat and disconnect from the world.

We’re looking within to find out who we really are, who the person is that God made us to be. If learning to amuse herself from time to time helps Teresa learn that about herself, I’m all for it.