From Dr. Malcom Grant’s Facebook Page

The concept of time, for as long as I can remember, has always amazed and fascinated me. For an hour flies when we are preoccupied and having fun, while it seems to take forever to pass when we are bored and there is little to distract us.

Has anyone ever noted that when we were children a year seemed like an eternity, however, today’s child is often heard to make observations like, “Christmas came around so quickly.” In other words, today’s child has an abbreviated perception of time, when compared to ours when we were children.

Do you realize that most of us are guilty of accelerating the passage of our children’s time? Our children are no longer allowed to pass their time almost wholly by their own design. Most of today’s children are provided with crutches to facilitate their passage of time. These crutches are almost exclusively of an electronic nature – a TV with multiple channels, a computer with a broad band link to the WWW or some type of gaming device.

None of us as parents like to hear our kids complain, “I am so bored”, so we intentionally set about to systematically make sure our kids are occupied with a plethora of anti-boredom, which often doubles as a babysitting, devices. However, how many of us have even stopped to ponder, if this is the right approach to raising a child with an enquiring and resourceful mind.

Think about this, while we are creating a generation of electronic junkies, are we possibly stifling inventiveness and creativity? For when we spoon feed our kids, with time distracting devises and activities (e.g. summer camps, fast food play grounds, etc.), could we be inadvertently nurturing an environment that stifles and stymie’s our child’s free thought and ingenuity.

May be it is time that we introduced some structured boredom* back into our kid’s lives. In so doing the child will be forced to find some novel ways of alleviating his or her boredom – even if it only amounted to working out the shape of a cloud, playing outdoors, developing their face-to-face socialization skills, counting the number of blue cars passing in front of their home, reading a book or newspaper or any of the numerous things we did when we were kids, in order to pass our time.

Just some food for thought.

*Structured boredom: Restricting their access to TV/ Internet/ Electronic Devices over the summer holidays… and possibly beyond