Mom, I am Bored. Main kya Karu?
Hi. I can’t come yaar. Sudhanshu will get bored over there, then I have to sit with him. I am not coming.
Hello and welcome to Musings of a MasterNi, I am Minal Desai and here I share with you a medley of my unique experiences shaped by students teachers and life in general.
So today I am gonna talk about something all of us face, “BOREDOM”. And something that our children face, “BOREDOM” and that is when the response that we have to how children view boredom is so very different to how our parents viewed it. Let me start with a personal example when we were young and if I was ever bored, honestly I did not have the guts to go and them my parents but even if I did at some point of time I managed to get to my dad, he had a very lovely phase, “diwal ae matha pachado.” His response was very clear that if you are bored it is not my concern. You can go bang your head in the wall if you want. That is when I realised that entertaining myself was my concern it wasn’t my parents prerogative to entertain me.
Cut to today, life has changed a lot of things are around, families have shrunken, children today have access to different technologies. In times like these, I wonder that children get bored very easily. Small little everyday things that used to excite us somehow fail our children to even blink an eye. I understand that they live in a different world. Every generation has its own challenges but what baffles me is our response as adults. As soon as a child is bored somehow we believe it is our job to entertain them. That is is our shortcoming if our children are bored as if getting bored is the sign of illness of mental health. Why?
Why do we put our children on a pedestal like that and say that we are here for you constantly? I have heard so many social plans not getting placed because children might get bored there. I have heard of so many parents trying to be children but no matter what you do your child is going to need other children or learn how to entertain himself or find a new hobby, get interested in things around them. You cannot and will not always be there for them. Will you? Also, there is very interesting research on these lines. There are a few TED talks and some articles that I will link after the blog. But it is definitely something worth pondering about.
Also at times, children use boredom as a trick to get what they want. They know that as soon as I go and tell the parent that I am bored, the genie called the phone will come out of the pocket and will be handed over to him/her whenever they want. So even if they are bored or not they ask for it. That is when we need to act and say, “My Dear find different ways to find newness in your everyday life. There is novelty all around you. Only a boring person gets bored. You cannot get bored, the world is full of possibilities.
Yes if you are expected to constantly be entertained then the child will get bored. So don’t you think that it’s time for us to take a step back and put the onus of entertaining himself/herself on the child rather than us.
What do you do when your child comes up and tell you I am bored? Do they come up and tell you that and what is your reaction? What is my reaction to that, I have become a little better than, my parents, first of all, they know that it is very rare or I simply stand there with a smug face/flat face and tell them that how is it my problem and somehow they don’t like me at that moment but they go back and find something interesting, they go back and mend ways with the cousin or they make friends with the neighbours or they simply sit and start reading which could be very interesting thing to do.
So that’s me the MasterNi signing off. Don’t forget to tell me what is it to be bored with the children and what has been your experience with it and don’t forget to subscribe to Musings Of A MasterNi.
