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.

Are We Raising Emotionally Avoidant Adults and Calling It Self-Care?

Recently, a student emailed me to let me know that she wouldn’t be attending class for the next few weeks because she was ‘prioritizing herself’. It’s something that I’ve been seeing more frequently. This one message stood out to me, not because self-prioritization is inherently wrong, but because of how commonly withdrawal is being reframed as growth. When did avoiding challenges become synonymous with strength?

I frequently hear phrases like ‘protecting my peace’, ‘this is triggering’, ‘I need to step away for my mental health’, or ‘I don’t have the capacity for this right now’. Mental health absolutely matters, and there are times and situations when stepping back is necessary, such as illness, grief, and acute mental health crises. Compassion and flexibility matter, but ordinary stress, frustration, or challenges are not the same as harm, and if we continue to treat them as such, we risk shrinking the very capacities that young adults need to develop. If higher education becomes organized primarily around comfort, it ceases to prepare students for life beyond university.

University is inherently demanding, and intellectual growth requires some cognitive discomfort. Similarly, relational growth often requires navigating conflict. If we are truly trying to help young adults to prepare for life after graduation, we must allow space for discomfort, not to overwhelm, but to teach them how to regulate, endure, and ultimately solve problems with increasing independence. 

Digital environments increasingly allow us to curate not only our social interactions, but our ideas. When young adults are consistently shielded from intellectual friction, confirmation bias deepens, and critical thinking can be short-circuited. Growth, whether emotional, relational, or cognitive, requires engagement with, not elimination of, discomfort.

The Line Between Regulation and Avoidance

An important distinction that is often missing from this conversation is that emotional regulation is not the same as emotional avoidance. On the surface, both can look similar; both may involve stepping back, taking space, or reducing intensity. But psychologically, they’re different processes with very different outcomes. 

Emotional regulation involves recognizing distress, calming the nervous system, and then re-engaging with the challenge from a calmer, steadier place. It isn’t about eliminating discomfort but rather increasing one’s capacity to remain present within it. For example, emotional regulation allows one to acknowledge that ‘this is difficult’, and ‘I need to gather myself so that I can face it.’ Over time, this process builds confidence because each successful encounter with stress becomes evidence that hard things can be managed. 

In late adolescence and early adulthood, identity formation is a central developmental task. This period is characterized by change, instability, and increasing responsibility. The capacity to manage stress doesn’t develop by removing it. It develops through repeated, supported exposure to manageable challenges. 

Emotional avoidance, in contrast, removes the stressors rather than building capacity to face them. It may involve withdrawing from a difficult conversation, dropping a demanding course, ignoring feedback, or avoiding situations that provoke discomfort. In the short term, avoidance reduces anxiety. The relief that comes from avoidance is immediate and can even feel empowering. Digital environments have made avoidance easier than ever; a mute button, an unfollow, a closed tab, and in so doing have normalized it as a default response.

Social media platforms reward emotional certainty and moral clarity. They often amplify language about ‘protecting your peace’, ‘cutting off toxicity’, often without nuance or context. Algorithms privilege content that validates rather than challenges, and decisive emotional messaging spreads more easily than developmental complexity.

At the same time, constant exposure to curated lives and public commentary heightens social comparison and perceived threats. Ordinary stress can feel amplified if it seems like everyone else is succeeding. The threshold for tolerable discomfort shrinks when the nervous system is saturated. 

If avoidance becomes the primary strategy for managing stress, the nervous system never learns that discomfort can be tolerated and worked through. The difficult class is never completed, the tense discussion is never repaired, and the challenging assignment is never revised after failure. Each escape reinforces that discomfort is something to be avoided.

In higher education, this distinction is especially important. University is not just a place to acquire information; it is a developmental training ground for adulthood. Students aren’t just learning content, but also how to handle deadlines, disagreements, evaluations, uncertainty, and responsibility. If the default response to stress is to disengage, many of these developmental opportunities can be missed.

None of this suggests that students should push through genuine crises or ignore serious mental health needs. It's also worth acknowledging that not all withdrawal is unfounded. Some students are navigating genuinely under-resourced environments, inadequate mental health support, or institutional failures that make discomfort feel less like growth and more like neglect. The answer in those cases isn't more endurance, it's better support. But that's a different problem than the one this piece is addressing. If ordinary academic and relational challenges are consistently framed as threats to well-being, we may be inadvertently making things harder for our students in the long run.

Beyond the Classroom

The consequences of this shift don’t end at graduation. Patterns rehearsed in adolescence and early adulthood tend to solidify over time. If withdrawal becomes the primary stress response, young adults may enter the workplace less prepared for feedback, less tolerant of ambiguity, and more likely to interpret ordinary professional pressure as personal harm. 

Work environments often require navigating criticism, managing deadlines, resolving conflict, and persisting through projects that are sometimes neither exciting nor affirming. Relationships might require repair after disagreements. Parenting requires endurance. Civic life requires engagement with perspectives that may not align with personal views. None of us is exempt from these demands. 

When distress tolerance remains underdeveloped, anxiety often increases rather than decreases. Novelty feels threatening, feedback destabilizing, conflict intolerable. Resilience is not only built in moments of crisis; it’s also built in the ordinary, repeated experiences of doing difficult things and realizing one can survive and even grow through them.

Building Capacity Instead

So what might a healthier model look like?

First, we must reclaim the original purpose of self-care. Self-care was never meant to eliminate challenge. It was meant to restore capacity. Rest isn’t the same as relief. Where relief removes discomfort, rest rebuilds strength. When self-care becomes synonymous with exit, we confuse temporary ease with long-term resilience.

Healthy self-care allows a student to say, “I need a moment,” not “I am done.” It creates space for recovery so re-engagement becomes possible. Regulation is what allows us to return. Avoidance ensures that we don’t.

For example, a student overwhelmed by deadlines might take an intentional evening of rest, stepping away from screens, sleeping, exercising, or speaking with a friend, and return the next day prepared to complete the work. Or a student upset by difficult feedback might pause to regulate the initial surge of emotion before revisiting the comments with curiosity rather than withdrawal. In digital life, logging off temporarily to calm comparison or outrage can serve the same purpose. In each case, rest restores capacity so that engagement remains possible. The challenge isn’t erased; the student is strengthened.

Second, we must acknowledge the role of digital architecture in shaping our thresholds for discomfort. Digital platforms are designed to reduce friction. They offer immediate distraction, curated agreement, and emotional validation at scale. When relief is always one scroll away, the skills required to sit with discomfort weaken. If our environments consistently remove cognitive and emotional friction, we shouldn’t be surprised when tolerance declines.

This doesn’t mean abandoning digital media. It means becoming intentional about it. Following diverse perspectives rather than only affirming ones. Pausing before disengaging from ideas that unsettle us. Creating spaces, online and offline, where disagreement is navigated rather than muted. If algorithms are optimized for comfort and certainty, development may require us to deliberately reintroduce complexity and nuance.

For example, a student who notices rising frustration while scrolling through political or social content might resist the instinct to immediately mute or unfollow. Instead, they might pause, read the argument fully, and ask, “Why does this unsettle me?” This does not require agreement, but it builds cognitive flexibility. Similarly, intentionally following a small number of thoughtful voices across perspectives can counteract the narrowing effect of algorithmic curation. The goal is not exposure for shock value, but exposure for growth.

Third, institutions of higher education can model a different narrative. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. We can validate distress while still inviting growth. We can design classrooms that normalize struggle as part of mastery. We can teach emotional regulation and distress tolerance explicitly, rather than assuming they will emerge naturally.

Early in a semester, an instructor might discuss the difference between harm and discomfort, explaining that confusion, frustration, and cognitive strain are often signs of learning, not failure. Students can be taught simple regulation strategies: how to pause before reacting to feedback, how to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, and how to tolerate the discomfort of not immediately understanding. When struggle is normalized and skills are named, students learn that difficulty is not a signal to exit but an invitation to grow.

Across my recent writing, I’ve returned repeatedly to a similar tension: we are mistaking comfort for well-being. In digital life, we mistake stimulation for meaning. In self-care culture, we mistake relief for restoration. In education, we risk mistaking avoidance for strength. The through line is consistent: when friction disappears entirely, growth stalls.

The goal is to raise adults who know that feeling overwhelmed is survivable. Adults who can rest, recalibrate, and return. Adults who can sit with disagreement without collapsing. Adults who can encounter difficulty without immediately interpreting it as harm.

If we want resilience, we can’t build lives organized entirely around the elimination of discomfort. We must build lives and learning environments that teach young adults how to move toward and through challenges with steadiness rather than away from them. That student who emailed me may eventually return to class, or she may not. Either way, the question isn't whether she needs space. It's whether that space is being used to prepare for re-entry, or to avoid it entirely.