Is Boredom Actually Good for Kids? What the Research Says

"I'm bored" is one of those phrases that makes a lot of parents reach for a screen, an activity, anything to fill the gap. There's a reasonable case for doing the opposite.

What's actually happening in a bored brain

In 2014, researchers Sandi Mann and Rebecca Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire ran a simple experiment: one group copied numbers out of a phone directory for 15 minutes — about as boring as a task gets — before being asked to think of creative uses for a pair of plastic cups. Compared to a group who went straight to the cup task, the bored-first group came up with more ideas, and more original ones.

The explanation researchers point to is the brain's "default mode network" — the same system that's active during daydreaming. When there's nothing external to focus on, this network doesn't switch off; it switches to connecting ideas, running through possibilities, and generating things it couldn't generate while busy with a task. Boredom, on this view, isn't empty time. It's the specific condition under which this kind of thinking happens.

Where this shows up for children specifically

Teresa Belton, a researcher at the University of East Anglia, spent years interviewing creative adults — novelists, artists, scientists — about their childhoods, and found a striking common thread: most described long, unstructured, occasionally boring stretches of time as children, with no adult programming what came next. Several described boredom directly as the thing that pushed them to invent a game, a story, or a project of their own.

This matches something else worth naming plainly: a child who is never bored is a child who has never had to supply their own entertainment. That's a skill, and like most skills it needs actual practice — which only happens in the gap that boredom creates.

Where the evidence is genuinely thinner than the headlines suggest

Here's the honest caveat most "boredom is good for kids" articles skip: the Mann and Cadman study, and most of the strongest research in this area, was conducted on adults, not children. A search of the psychological literature turns up a real gap — boredom's effect on adult creativity is well studied; boredom's effect on child creativity specifically is much thinner ground, mostly inference and observation rather than controlled experiment.

That doesn't mean the adult findings don't apply to children — the same default mode network exists in a child's brain — but it's a genuine gap between what's proven and what's a reasonable, widely-held extrapolation. Worth knowing before repeating it as settled fact.

What this means for an actual Tuesday afternoon

• Resist the urge to fill the silence immediately. The research suggests the useful part happens a few minutes into "there's nothing to do," not before it.
• A book is a good bridge, not a distraction. Unlike a screen, reading still leaves room for a child's own imagination to do work — it doesn't supply every image and idea the way video does.
• Notice what a child invents, not just what they consume. A child who turns a cardboard box into a spaceship is doing exactly what the research describes.
• This isn't an argument against all structure — it's an argument for leaving some real gaps in a heavily scheduled week.

Sources

Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014). Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2).

Belton, T., University of East Anglia — research on childhood boredom and adult creativity, based on interviews with creative professionals.

This article summarises publicly available research for general information and is not a substitute for advice from a paediatrician or child development specialist about an individual child.