One of the prevailing messages of early childrearing and parenting advice is about ensuring that you’re stimulating your baby enough, so they stay on track towards reaching key developmental milestones. Parents are guided to do things like narrate their daily activity aloud, because speaking in a baby’s presence supports brain and language development. Likewise, there is guidance about exposing your child to high contrast images, an assortment of music, a range of smells, textures, and activities that help stretch their gross motor skills and expand their sensory awareness. (In fact, a large part of the toy and baby commerce industry is built around this advice.) Through it all, you’re supposed to make eye contact, skin contact, and expose them to as many voices as possible, a list of demands that I do believe in earnest is very important, and tried my best at, but also found it hard to conduct myself in all these activities while maintaining my sanity as a functioning adult.
The idea, of course, is that stimulation builds brain and nervous system connectivity, big vocabularies, awareness, and are the first things you can be in control of doing to promote your child’s ability to thrive in this world.
As first-time parents, we did many of these things, particularly with Ada, to the extremes that people who are highly prepared and overthinking the arrival of their first child do. I remember that I had been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude when she was born, so instead of then reading aloud rhymes or singing songs, I decided to read the 150 remaining pages of the book aloud while leaning over her crib. It seemed like a good way to do the whole “expose the baby to a wide variety of words” thing while also at home alone during maternity leave without another adult to speak to when narrating aloud felt silly and unnatural.
At some point we either became experienced enough, too busy, or overwhelmed by a second child, so we stopped preoccupying ourselves with whether or not we were stimulating our child enough, only to transition into the phase of parenting where one of the recurring refrains is to Let The Children Be Bored because the world is too overstimulating (screens, internet, modern life, etc.).
The idea here is that boredom, and intentionally not overstimulating (or by extension, over-programming) your child, is important for kids to build self-sufficiency, problem-solving skills, and give them the time and space to simply figure out how to preoccupy themselves. A bored kid harkens images of a child wandering the forest or the fields, building fairy houses and turning over rocks, engaged in the slow act of noticing, not a helicopter parent in site. Slow childhood and creating the environment that allows for more boredom are conditions we treasure in our very information-saturated world. It’s often made synonymous with spending more time in nature, though the latter to me is a much more tangible desire than the first.
My guess is that anyone who is consciously thinking about how bored or how stimulated their child is is doing just fine. I can’t help but see this as a problem created by parents who wrestle with their own restlessness and find barometers to measure the ways they are and are not doing enough, or often to judge others on the same. Given that parents largely dictate how children spend their time until their tweens or teens, there’s a huge onus for the decisions and investments of the parents (especially in the US) to be reflected in capabilities of the child—whether those are skills like gymnastics, violin, how to cook, etc. or socio-emotional capacities developed—like the ability to sit patiently in a restaurant through a family dinner without a screen in front of their faces. This, our individualistic assessment that over-indexes on the child’s abilities and behavior as a reflection of whether they were exposed to just the right conditions, increasingly emphasizes not just nurture but the right nurture.
As summer break approaches, and parents confront a wide swath of time in which the children can do any number of things, the pressure mounts and I think we go back and forth between longing for somewhat nostalgic versions of summer boredom and a more modern pressure to stimulate, engage, educate, accelerate. Boredom—I call nostalgic—because the actual environment for it can be very hard to create given the lack of leeway we give other parents to allow their children actual independence at a young age.
I was listening to an interview with the writer Hua Hsu on the Longform podcast last week, who wrote an incredible memoir, Stay True, about his time in college at UC Berkeley in the late 90s. In it he described not wanting about that time to be especially nostalgic, because, to paraphrase, when nostalgia becomes annoying it’s when it becomes some kind of contest of who had it better back then.
I think about this with regard to nostalgia for childhood boredom and our tendency to imagine a boredom of the 80s, of meandering bike rides around our suburban neighborhoods, and playing in the creek for hours, as though that were a better kind of boredom than sitting in a Brooklyn apartment trying to not turn on the tv until 4 pm.
I think we’re actually nostalgic for what felt like the greater freedom of parents to operate without as much influence, FOMO, guilt, and comparison, where only loosely knowing where your kids were during summer days from 9-5 was less negligence and more of a given. The very concept of not having to do the emotional labor of programming all that time and then wondering if you did the right thing with it—enough boredom? enough stimulation?—seems so damn freeing in a present world where parenting both inadvertently and intentionally contains so many signals. It’s our own version of the kind of nostalgia that leads to the “walking uphill in the snow both ways” storytelling around grit where in the end, we question why it mattered in the first place because the conditions for boredom feel so much more a product of the kind of kid you are and how your mind works than the buffet of options constantly placed in front of you by your parents or anyone else, for that matter.
Recommendations:
To visit: The Gilder Center, the new wing of the American Museum of Natural History, but get there first thing in the morning and if you live in NYC helps 10000% to have a membership so you can book tickets to all the special exhibits.
To eat: After we got overwhelmed by the museum, but Julian and Jacob were checking out the Serengeti migration movie, she and I escaped to Joe’s Steam Rice Roll, a kind of folded Taiwanese noodle filled with whatever you please (shrimp, pork, corn, scallions, egg, etc.) and really hit the spot.
To eat: Haagen Dazs Pineapple Coconut ice cream which is a flavor I never would have chosen, but Julian did and it’s….incredible?
To read: The Jia Tolentino piece on Matt Healy in the New Yorker, which I listened to Audm walking around the park.
To read: This list of the best summer shoes for kids (that are not Natives) that I put together for The Strategist.
To read: Re-recommending Yellowface by R.F. Kuang because it’s a scathing satire page turner and I want to talk to someone about it! I am also just starting Biting the Hand: Growing up in Black and White America by Julia Lee, which has been recommended to me by coutless people.
See you next week!
This reminds me of something I think to myself all the time -- I would much rather parent in the era of leaving my kids in the car (like my mom did ALL THE TIME) and than the iPad era. Perhaps that is nostalgia's grip on me, though.
I hardly comment here, but I really appreciate your thoughtful work here. I've been reading for over a year. I almost always come away from your essays and lists with things to think about throughout my day. Thank you for your work!