Boredom Jar Ideas, and Why I Don’t Have One

I don’t have a boredom jar. I used to teach one, to parents in a course I ran, and the distance between those two sentences is this whole essay.

The jar was never for the kid. It was for the parent who could not yet get through “I’m bored” without handing over a screen, and it worked the way training wheels work: it held her up while she learned to hold the line. In my house we never needed one, because my kids know exactly what the options are when they’re bored, they know a screen isn’t one of them, and holding that boundary has never been the hard part for me. That’s the honest version of why I don’t have a jar. It isn’t that I’m above it. It’s that the jar solves a parent problem, and I didn’t have that one.

So if you searched for boredom jar ideas, you’ll get them, right now, because you came for them. Then I’ll tell you what the jar is actually for, and what boredom is for, which is the part nobody puts on a popsicle stick.

The boredom jar ideas, since you asked

Here is what goes in most of them, and it’s fine. For little kids: build a fort out of couch cushions, make a card for someone, sort the recycling by color, put on a show, dig in the yard. For the eight-to-twelve crowd, which is where most of the “bored jar for tweens” searches are coming from: teach yourself a card trick from a book, cook one thing start to finish, write a comic, take apart something that’s already broken, reorganize your own room the way you actually want it, learn ten words in another language, plan a meal and then make it. For teenagers the jar mostly gets ignored, which tells you something.

None of those are bad ideas. Some of them are good ideas. The problem isn’t the list. The problem is who’s holding it, and why.

What boredom is, and why your kid says it like an accusation

When a child says “I’m bored,” she is almost never describing an empty afternoon. She’s describing the gap between how stimulated she was a minute ago and how stimulated she is now, and she’s handing you that gap to fill, because in most houses that is exactly what happens next. Someone fills it. A snack, a screen, a suggestion, a jar.

And I understand the reflex, because “I’m bored” lands on a parent like a complaint about the service, and the parents I taught the jar to were the ones for whom the complaint was unbearable, the ones who could hold every other boundary in the house but folded on this one, every afternoon, and reached for the tablet. The jar gave them something to reach for instead. That’s a real use. It is also, if you leave it in place, the same problem in a mason jar, because somebody is still filling the gap for the child.

Here’s what’s actually going on underneath it, though. Boredom is the feeling of a mind that has run out of external input and hasn’t yet turned inward to generate its own. That’s it. It’s not a problem state; it’s a transition state, and it only lasts as long as it takes for the mind to turn the corner. When you fill the gap for a child, you don’t help her through the transition. You cancel it. She never gets to the part where the corner gets turned, and so she never learns that she can turn it, and so the next time the feeling arrives she hands it to you again, faster, and louder.

There’s research on the other side of the corner, and it’s the kind I trust because it’s specific. In 2014 two British psychologists, Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, gave adults a deliberately boring task (copying numbers out of a phone directory) and then a creative one, and the people who’d been bored first came up with more ideas, and more unusual ones, than the people who hadn’t. Bored readers did even better than bored writers. Their explanation was daydreaming: a bored mind wanders, and a wandering mind makes connections a busy one doesn’t. The same year, a team at the University of Colorado led by Jane Barker looked at seventy six-year-olds and found that the more of a child’s week was spent in less-structured time (free play, outings, reading, hanging around) rather than in lessons and organized activities, the better she was at what they call self-directed executive function, which is the plain-English ability to decide what to do and then do it without an adult setting it up. The kids with the most scheduled weeks were the worst at it.

Read those two together and you have the case against the jar as a permanent fixture. It’s a schedule in a mason jar. It takes the exact moment a child would otherwise learn to generate her own next thing and hands her someone else’s. Use it if you need it to get yourself through the first month of holding the line. Then take the lid off and let the sticks run out.

What I watched it become

Here’s where this goes. I taught the kids on the other end of it for eleven years.

I had high school students, bright ones, who would not start a task until they’d asked me what it was worth. In the whole of their lives nobody had ever handed them an unstructured hour and walked away, so the idea that you might do something because you were curious, or restless, or just because the afternoon was there, was foreign to them. Every minute had come pre-filled. School filled the day, activities filled the afternoon, a screen filled the gaps, and by fifteen they were waiting to be told what to think about, and they treated a blank page the way a two-year-old treats a dark room.

That’s the systems layer, and the blame belongs there, not on you. A school day that runs on bells does not leave room for a child to be bored in a way that goes anywhere. The activity industry sells you the fear that an unfilled hour is a wasted one. And the devices are engineered, on purpose, by people who are very good at their jobs, to make sure the transition state never arrives at all, because a bored kid is a kid who might put the thing down. Your child’s inability to be bored is not a flaw in your child. It is the predictable result of a childhood that has been designed, by a lot of well-funded adults, to never have a gap in it.

The part that’s hard to hear

Boredom is uncomfortable to watch. It’s supposed to be. Your kid will whine, she’ll follow you around, she’ll say she hates it here, and every cell in your body will want to fix it, partly because you love her and partly because the whining is unbearable. I know. My kids are bored all the time; every single day one of them tells me so. My answer never changes: that’s great. Your boredom is not my problem. You can find something to do, or I will happily find something for you to do, and there is always schoolwork and there are always chores. They know a screen isn’t the answer, and they know why, because we’ve talked about what it does to a developing brain and about dopamine and about why boredom is where creativity comes from. So they go find something. It takes real effort not to solve it, and the effort is the whole job.

But if you can make it through the first twenty minutes without rescuing her, something happens in the second twenty that you can’t buy and can’t put in a jar. She turns the corner. She wanders outside, or picks up something she’d abandoned, or starts a game nobody assigned, and the thing she does next is hers in a way that nothing from a popsicle stick will ever be. Our mud kitchen ran for years on nothing but boredom and rain. Nobody ever suggested it. (I wrote about that here.)

Your kid’s boredom isn’t the problem. Your discomfort with it is.

I’ve been watching something happen at parks for years. A child says “I’m bored,” and within seconds the parent jumps in. Go try the swings, what about the slide, do you want to play tag, let’s find something to do. It’s fast and automatic and almost instinctive, and it isn’t just one parent. It’s at playdates and family gatherings and in conversations with friends who are genuinely exhausted from trying to keep their kids constantly entertained (“I feel like I have to have something planned all the time”).

And the more I watch it, the more I find myself wondering what we’re so afraid of. Kids say “I’m bored” all the time, it’s a normal part of childhood, but the urgency? That’s coming from somewhere else. Most of us aren’t reacting to boredom itself, we’re reacting to what we think boredom represents. It feels like wasted time, like a missed opportunity for learning or enrichment. It can feel like unhappiness, like something we should step in and soften. And honestly, it can also feel like a reflection of us, like maybe we should have planned better, prepared more, done something differently. So we fill the space, not always because our kids are demanding it, but because we’ve internalized the idea that empty time is something to avoid.

Then there’s the quiet comparison: the beautifully set-up Pinterest activities, the curated play spaces, the sense that other parents are more prepared and more on top of it. It creates a standard that’s hard to ignore, that good parenting looks like constant engagement and that childhood should be optimized, and because it’s so common, it feels right. But in trying to eliminate boredom, we’ve made it harder for kids to know what to do without us.

So that pull to jump in and fix it, that quiet anxiety that maybe you should be doing something, isn’t a sign you’re failing. It’s a sign you’ve absorbed the same cultural messages we all have, that good parenting means constant engagement and that presence requires participation.

One afternoon at the park I watched a kid spend twenty minutes with a stick and some rocks while his mom sat on the bench, not intervening. At first he was just poking at the ground. Then he started arranging the rocks in patterns, and then he was building something (I’m still not sure what), completely absorbed. His mom told me later he’d been complaining about being bored five minutes before I arrived. She’d just… waited.

One thing

The next time you hear “I’m bored,” say “okay,” and mean it as a complete sentence. Don’t offer a screen and don’t offer a suggestion, and if there’s a jar in your house, leave it on the shelf this once. Then time it. Notice how long it takes for something to happen, and notice that it does. If you want to understand why some kids can do this at ten and others can’t, I wrote about that here.

If you’ve been watching your kid come home from school with nothing left and no idea what to do with an empty hour, and you’ve started to suspect the problem isn’t the hour, Breaking Default is the thing I built for that suspicion. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Mann S, Cadman R, “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?” Creativity Research Journal 26(2), 2014. Link
• Barker JE, Semenov AD, Michaelson L, Provan LS, Snyder HR, Munakata Y, “Less-structured time in children’s daily lives predicts self-directed executive functioning,” Frontiers in Psychology 5:593, 2014. Link