The Lost Art of Staring Out the Window

Boredom is Not an Emergency: Why Kids Need More Space to Figure It Out

The night before a long drive, I charged every device in the house, made sure that each kid had their own headphones. I even loaded a few shows on the tablet just in case wifi was spotty. I’ve done this before every family trip for years. 

Ironically, my professional life is spent researching exactly what children lose when we solve their boredom with a screen. 

When I finally noticed the contradiction, I didn’t find it funny. I found it unsettling because if I, someone who understands this, who researches it, believes it still reaches for the devices, then the argument that parents just need more awareness seems a bit hollow. The pull isn’t ignorance, it’s something else.

I know this because I’ve been on the other side of it.

It’s 1987. We’re packing the car for the eight-hour drive to visit my grandparents.

At the beginning, everyone is excited. The trip feels like an adventure. We pile into the car with snacks, pillows, and the vague optimism that eight hours won’t feel quite that long.

Fast forward three hours.

We’ve played every car game we can think of. I’ve already fought with my siblings at least three times. My dad has threatened to pull the car over twice.

And with five hours still remaining, there’s suddenly nothing left to do.

So I stare out the window.

For a while I count cars or road signs. Eventually even that gets boring. And when boredom settles in long enough, something else starts to happen.

My mind wanders.

I imagine conversations, replay things that had happened at school, invent stories, or picture what the rest of the trip might look like. Somewhere between road signs and daydreams, the time slowly starts to pass again.

The boredom felt excruciating and daydreaming was how my brain dealt with it.

I remember wishing there was something—anything—to make the time pass faster. But those long stretches of staring out the window were doing something important.

When the brain isn’t occupied by external stimulation, it begins to turn inward. Psychologists refer to this as activation of the default mode network, a system in the brain that becomes active when we’re not focused on a specific task. You can think of it as the brain’s background processing mode. During these moments, the mind begins to wander. It replays memories, imagines future possibilities, connects ideas, and experiments with stories and scenarios. This is why people often report having their best ideas while walking, showering, or staring out a window. What appears to be idle time is often when the brain is quietly doing some of its most integrative thinking.

Today, however, boredom rarely lasts long enough for that process to begin. When the first signs of restlessness appear, there is almost always a device within reach, something to watch, scroll, or play. The moment of discomfort disappears almost instantly.

And when boredom disappears too quickly, the mental space where imagination and self-directed thinking begin has far less opportunity to emerge.

What Boredom Actually Is

When a child says “I’m bored,” it’s usually treated as a problem to be solved. Adults often respond by suggesting an activity, turning on a screen, or stepping in to provide entertainment. If I ever said that I was bored when my mom was around, she would suggest that she could find several chores around the house, which helped me find other things to do on my own. It worked, being outside riding my bike seemed way more appealing than whatever she would come up with.

Boredom isn’t an experience that should be avoided. Boredom occurs when stimulation is low, novelty is missing, and attention is not being pulled in any particular direction. The brain is essentially saying: there is nothing capturing my attention right now. 

That lack of stimulation does feel uncomfortable. It motivates us to do something about it. Restlessness starts to build, time seems to drag on forever, and our minds start searching for anything to engage with to relieve the tension.

As boredom continues, we start asking ourselves questions such as, “What could I do?”, “What might be interesting?’, “What can I explore, imagine, or create?”. Sometimes that leads us to doing something such as playing a game, having a conversation. Other times, it turns inward towards imagination or daydreaming.  Regardless of what we choose to do, this moment is critical. It's the moment when the mind begins to move from passive consumption toward active, self-directed thought and behavior. 

Why Boredom Doesn’t Happen Much Anymore

For most of human history, some boredom was unavoidable. Waiting rooms were quiet, car rides were long, lines moved slowly. If there was nothing happening around you, you had no choice but to endure it. Those moments weren’t always enjoyable, but they were quite common. Boredom was an unavoidable part of everyday life.

Today, however, many of those moments of inevitable boredom have disappeared. When I feel even a slight twinge of boredom, my phone comes out. If I am in a grocery store line, I check my texts, emails, check to see if I have any notifications. Within seconds, my phone can provide endless content.

In many ways, this is remarkable. Digital tools have made information, entertainment, and connection instantly accessible. They’ve increased productivity and provided learning opportunities that previous generations could not have imagined.

But with those benefits, our technology has also changed something with respect to our relationship with discomfort and our willingness to tolerate boredom. In the past, boredom often lasted long enough to motivate us to begin searching for something to do. 

Today, instead of asking “What can I do to relieve this boredom?”, my brain already knows that a quick escape is available by just pulling my phone out. My brain has learned that it doesn’t need to generate its own ideas because something else has already been provided. 

Over time, the nervous system adapts to the environment it lives in. If boredom is rarely experienced, the willingness to sit with it decreases. If stimulation arrives instantly, the brain, instead, becomes accustomed to receiving stimulation rather than creating it. 

What Children Lose When Boredom Disappears

For generations, periods of boredom acted as a developmental training ground. It created moments of tension that pushed children to invent games, explore ideas, or initiate action on their own. Over time, this helped build the skills that allowed children to learn to direct their own attention and motivation.

One of the first abilities affected by this change is self-directed activity. When children have to regularly resolve their own boredom, they begin to generate ideas: building something, drawing, exploring outside, or inventing games. When stimulation is always available, that process of internal problem-solving is less necessary. The choice to go outside instead of doing chores inside was the easy part. Then I had to figure out what to do. This led to exploration on my bike, climbing trees, testing my limits and finding out what things I enjoyed doing. 

Another capacity that boredom is essential for is imagination. Daydreaming, storytelling, and creative play often emerge after the initial discomfort of boredom is endured. If boredom is short-circuited every time it begins to emerge, the transition from restlessness to imagination won’t happen as frequently. Survey stakes made great swords and provided hours of entertainment through imaginary battles. 

Tolerance of boredom also helps to build persistence. When the brain has no choice but to tolerate boredom before something interesting happens, it strengthens the ability to stay with a task or problem. If the environment trains constant escape, the impulse to switch tasks rather than to persist becomes stronger.

I once built a tire swing with my brother but we didn’t want one down near the ground, we wanted one way up in a tree. Neither of us were strong enough to lift the tire into the tree so we had to figure out how to use ropes to lever it into place. We didn’t dare ask our parents for help as we were worried that they would tell us that we weren’t allowed to do it. So we stuck with it for hours and lots of failed attempts but we finally got it way up in the tree.

One of the most important skills that boredom can help children with is the development of internal motivation. If they have the opportunity to sit with and ultimately resolve their own boredom, children learn that they can initiate their own engagement rather than waiting for stimulation to arrive from outside. Nobody suggested we build that tire swing. Nobody checked on our progress or told us to keep going. That's what internal motivation looks like: a kid who has learned that engagement doesn't have to arrive from outside.

Protecting Boredom

If boredom once occurred naturally and now happens less often, the question becomes what we should do about it. The answer is not to eliminate technology or to romanticize the past. Digital tools have transformed how we learn, communicate, and solve problems. They are not going away, nor should they. But if boredom has developmental value, we may need to be more intentional about protecting it.

This begins with recognizing that boredom is not an emergency that adults need to jump in and fix.

When a child says, “I’m bored,” it is tempting to respond immediately with a suggestion, a solution, or a screen. In the moment, that response feels helpful. It relieves the tension quickly.

But boredom is often just the starting point of something important.

If the moment is allowed to linger, the mind begins to search. A child may eventually wander outside, start drawing, build something, or invent a game. The activity itself is less important than the process that leads to it. The child learns how to move from restlessness to engagement on their own.

Parents and adults can support this process in small ways.

1. Stop Treating Boredom as an Emergency.

When a child says, “I’m bored, “ our instinct is to fix it. My mother’s “fix” was suggesting chores, which I quickly learned to avoid by finding my own fun.

Strategy: Allow the moment to linger before jumping in to solve.

I remember a summer afternoon when my kids were young, no plans, nowhere to be. The complaints started almost immediately. I'm bored. There's nothing to do. I told them to figure it out, which took more restraint than I expected. An hour later they were outside with hammers, nails and some scrap lumber. They created something between a game and a construction project. I still don't know exactly what it was. I don't think it mattered.

2. Resist Filling Every “Quiet” Moment

We often use podcasts or tablets to “survive” car rides. But those quiet stretches are the primary breeding ground for connection.

Strategy: Allow silence to open the door.

My son and I drive to and from work together. Some of the best conversations I've had with him have happened in that car — the kind that wander into territory you wouldn't reach over a planned dinner or a scheduled catch-up. None of those conversations would have happened if we'd filled the drive with podcasts or audiobooks. The silence at the start of the trip is usually what opens the door.

3. Provide "Possibilities", Not Just Entertainment.

There is a profound difference between a toy that does something and a space that allows for something. 

Strategy:  Look for “loose parts” over “fixed play.”

Growing up on an acreage, we had woods, a slough, trees, and enough scrap lumber and old rope lying around to build almost anything. Nobody designed it as a play space. Nobody scheduled it. But we caught frogs in the slough, climbed everything climbable, dug holes in search of buried treasure that was never there, and built structures that probably weren't safe and definitely weren't approved. The space didn't provide entertainment. It provided possibilities. That distinction turns out to matter quite a bit.

4. Model Stillness

Children are astute observers. If every idle moment leads us to check our phones, we communicate to our children that stillness is something to escape. But when children see adults reading, thinking, walking, or simply sitting without immediate stimulation, they learn that quiet moments are not something to fear.

Sometimes the most valuable thing we can give children is not something new to do, but the time and space to figure it out for themselves. 

Strategy: Show them that quiet isn’t a void.

I'm the one who stared out that window in 1987. I'm also the one who checks his phone in the grocery line before the first flicker of boredom has time to finish forming. Both of those things are true, and the distance between them is where this whole question lives.

I don't think awareness closes that distance by itself. But I do think naming the contradiction honestly is the only way we can begin to bridge it.