Home › Blog › Why Kids Need to Be Bored
Parenting & Science

Why Kids Need to Be Bored: The Science of Doing Nothing

We run a directory of a thousand classes, camps and clubs — so trust us when we say this: the empty afternoon matters too. A growing body of research shows that boredom isn't a gap in a child's development. It's part of the machinery.

📅 September 9, 2026 · GOkidOZ Boston · 7 min read
Young girl who invented her own job — watering garden plants with a little blue can
Nobody scheduled this. That's the point.

"I'm booooored." Every parent knows the word, stretched to four syllables, delivered like an accusation. Our instinct is to fix it — a snack, a screen, an activity. But researchers who study boredom keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the fixing is the problem. Boredom, tolerated, is one of the most productive states a young brain can be in.

What boredom actually is

Psychologists define boredom not as "nothing to do" but as the itch of an unengaged mind — wanting stimulation and not finding it. That itch is uncomfortable on purpose. It's the brain's way of saying: go generate something. When an adult swoops in with entertainment, the itch gets scratched from outside — and the generating never happens. When a child has to sit with it, something remarkable follows: the mind starts wandering, imagining, planning. And that's where the science gets interesting.

Three things research says boredom builds

1. Creativity — boredom is a launchpad for ideas

British psychologist Sandi Mann ran a now-famous pair of experiments: adults were first given a deliberately boring task — copying, then merely reading, phone numbers from a directory — before a creativity test (inventing uses for plastic cups). The bored groups generated significantly more, and more original, ideas than the control group, and the more boring the first task, the more creative the output. Mann's explanation: boredom triggers daydreaming, and daydreaming is where the mind links things it never linked before. Her advice to parents is blunt — stop rushing to entertain, because a bored child is a child about to invent something.

The study

Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014), "Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?", Creativity Research Journal, 26(2).

Toddler girl covered head-to-toe in finger paint, beaming — the aftermath of unsupervised creativity
Boredom, twenty minutes later.

2. Executive function — empty time teaches self-direction

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tracked how 6-year-olds spent their weeks — structured activities (lessons, practices, organized anything) versus less-structured time (free play, self-chosen reading, made-up games). The more less-structured time children had, the better their "self-directed executive function": the ability to set their own goal and organize themselves to reach it, without an adult steering. Kids whose calendars were mostly structured were measurably worse at it. Executive function in childhood predicts academic and life outcomes decades out — and it appears to be built, in part, in the hours nobody programmed.

The study

Barker, J. et al. (2014), "Less-structured time in children's daily lives predicts self-directed executive functioning", Frontiers in Psychology, 5:593.

3. An inner life — daydreaming is when the brain builds a self

Neuroscientists call it the default mode network — the set of brain regions that lights up precisely when a child is doing "nothing." Far from idling, this network handles some of childhood's biggest jobs: making sense of experiences, imagining the future, understanding other people's feelings, and stitching together a sense of identity. USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's review of the evidence is titled, fittingly, "Rest Is Not Idleness" — constructive daydreaming, her team argues, is essential for memory consolidation, moral reasoning and wellbeing, and a childhood with no mental downtime shortchanges all three.

The study

Immordino-Yang, M.H. et al. (2012), "Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain's Default Mode for Human Development and Education", Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4).

Education researcher Teresa Belton, who interviewed authors, artists and scientists about their childhoods for the University of East Anglia, adds a fourth: many traced their creative careers to long stretches of childhood boredom that forced them to fill the space with stories, drawings and inventions. Boredom, she concluded, is how children develop an "internal stimulus" — the ability to be the source of their own interest.

Two young sisters reading a book together in a golden field at sunset — self-chosen, unstructured time
Less-structured time: nobody assigned this book.

Why this is harder than it used to be

Boredom used to be unavoidable — car rides, waiting rooms, long Sunday afternoons. Now every gap has a screen-shaped plug. The catch: a screen doesn't resolve boredom, it postpones it. It provides the stimulation without demanding any generation — the itch is gone, but the muscle never fires. (Adults are no better: in a famous Virginia study, many people preferred giving themselves mild electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.) A child who never has to convert boredom into an idea simply doesn't get the reps.

How to let boredom do its job

To be clear: the research favors boredom in doses, not deprivation. Chronic, inescapable boredom — nothing to do, nowhere to go, week after week — is linked in teens to risk-taking, not creativity. The goal is a rhythm: rich activities and protected emptiness. Structure and space, both.
Child's hands deep in a gloriously messy finger-painting session — paint bottles and torn paper everywhere
Boring-friendly materials at work. Yes, it's a mess. It's supposed to be.

The GOkidOZ take

It might seem odd for a classes-and-activities directory to write a love letter to the empty afternoon. But it's the same belief that started this site: every child is bright and talented, and what they need is the right input — not the most. Pick the class your kid genuinely lights up about (that's what the directory is for). Then guard the blank hours around it like they're part of the curriculum. Because they are.

References

Photos: Unsplash (free license).

What has your kid invented out of sheer boredom? Blanket forts, backyard economies, novels in crayon — tell me, and I'll share the best ones with our community. 💛