Why Your Kid Can’t Entertain Themselves (and How That Changes)

A ten-year-old who cannot be alone with himself for eleven minutes has not failed at anything. He is a kid who has never once been left alone with himself for eleven minutes, and those are very different problems with very different fixes.

The age question first, because it’s what most people typed. Then why it’s the wrong question.

At what age should a child be able to entertain themselves?

Earlier than you think, and for longer than you’d guess, if nobody gets in the way. A baby of six or seven months will work on a single problem (a spoon, a box lid, her own foot) for stretches that would embarrass most adults, which is the whole point of the essay I wrote about why babies throw things. A toddler can play alone for ten or fifteen minutes at a time with someone in the room. A three- or four-year-old who’s used to it can go half an hour or more, and a child of seven or eight who has grown up with unstructured time can lose a whole afternoon to something she made up herself. Those aren’t targets. They’re just what the capacity looks like when it’s been left alone to grow.

So when a parent tells me her ten-year-old can’t entertain himself, I don’t hear a developmental problem. Ten-year-olds are spectacularly good at entertaining themselves; it’s the age of elaborate imaginary economies and forts with bylaws. I hear a kid whose capacity got interrupted somewhere between the high chair and now, and the interesting question is by what.

Why it happens (it isn’t your kid)

Three things, usually stacked on top of each other, and none of them is a character flaw.

The first is the schedule. A team at the University of Colorado led by Jane Barker looked at seventy six-year-olds in 2014 and sorted their weeks into structured time (lessons, practices, organized activities, anything an adult set up and ran) and less-structured time (free play, outings, reading, hanging around the house). The children with more less-structured time were better at what the researchers call self-directed executive function, which is the ability to decide what to do next and then do it without anyone telling you. The children with the most structured weeks were the worst at it. That is exactly the skill “entertaining yourself” requires, and the study says we are training it out of children one enrichment activity at a time. No single activity is the problem. The sum of them leaves no gap in which the skill could ever be practiced.

The second is the screen. Screens don’t rot brains. What a screen does is simpler and worse: it makes the gap disappear. The moment between “I have nothing to do” and “I found something to do” is where a child learns she can find something to do. A device is engineered to arrive in that moment, every time, before the child has to turn the corner herself, and a kid who has had a phone in that gap since she was four has never turned the corner. Not once. Of course she can’t entertain herself at ten. She has never been given the chance to learn she could. I wrote more about that gap and what it’s for here.

The third is us. Most of us, without meaning to, have become the entertainment. We suggest, we set up, we join in, we redirect, we narrate. Some of that is love and some of it is a school model of childhood we absorbed without noticing, in which an adult is always supposed to be running the activity. A kid who has been managed all day, every day, quite reasonably concludes that activities are things adults produce, and waits for the next one.

What I watched it become

I taught the grown-up version of that kid for eleven years. High school students, plenty of them bright, who would sit in front of an open-ended assignment and wait. Not struggle: wait. They wanted to know exactly what I wanted, how long it should be, what it was worth, and an assignment with real room in it made some of them visibly anxious. They weren’t incapable. They had simply never, in fifteen years, been handed an unstructured hour and trusted with it, and so the muscle that turns an empty stretch of time into something wasn’t there. That’s not a teenage problem. It starts in the years you’re in right now.

What actually changes it

The good news is real: this capacity comes back fast, because it isn’t gone, it’s just unused. What a kid needs is empty time, a little boredom, and an adult who doesn’t flinch.

Start smaller than you want to. Ten minutes, not an afternoon. Say “I’m going to be in the kitchen for ten minutes and I’m not available,” and then be in the kitchen and not available, which is the hard part. Don’t set up an activity first. Don’t leave a screen within reach. Expect the whining, because there will be whining; a kid who’s never had to generate his own next thing will experience the gap as an emergency, and he’ll bring the emergency to you. Say “okay” and keep chopping.

In my house the rule has been the same for years: when you’re bored, you know the options, and a screen isn’t one of them. That sentence has done more for my kids’ ability to fill an hour than any toy I ever bought, because it takes the negotiation off the table. There’s nothing to campaign for, so they go do something.

The second day is easier than the first. By the second week you’ll catch him halfway into something before he remembers to complain, and that moment, the one where he forgets to be bored, is the whole thing. Then you make the ten minutes twenty, and you protect it the way you’d protect a nap, because it does about as much for him.

One more thing about materials, because the old version of this essay was mostly a toy list and it needs one paragraph, not forty. Fewer things, more open-ended, within reach. Blocks, paper, tape, a box, the yard. A room with forty toys in it is a room a kid can’t start in; a room with six is a room he can. That’s the entire toy strategy, and it’s free.

One thing

Pick one ten-minute window this week, tell your kid you’re unavailable, and don’t rescue the boredom. Then notice what he does in minute nine.

If your kid is in school and you’ve started to suspect that the reason he can’t fill an hour has something to do with how his day is filled for him, Breaking Default is where I take that apart. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• 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