Jessica’s note: Credit for the name & motivation for this series goes to my creative and wise friend Wendy Speake. 

As I type this, it’s the dog days of summer, the last sad dying days of August. In a few short sleeps, all the kids will be shuffling to bus stops, slamming lockers, plopping down disgruntled in stiff metal desks.

Summer is dying, basically.

If you’re a kid, summer now can be counted down in hours. The moment is now to savor sunshine and freedom and make some memories. So, naturally, I looked outside the other day to see a herd of preteens living it up. And by, “living it up,” I mean:

Three boys whizzed around on skateboards, and a girl was lurking off to the side with a dog. FOR TWENTY STRAIGHT MINUTES, THEY WERE ON THEIR PHONES. No talking, no smiling. Pecking, scrolling, selfie-ing.  Did you hear me say “skateboards”? It was as impressive as it was sad.

I venture to guess that the twenty minutes I observed were not an isolated pocket of summer for these young ones. This is life for a kid now: dodging potholes while double-tapping.

Now, I’m not here to hate on Instagram or Pandora, and how I ever got anywhere without Google Maps is an absolute mystery.

All I’m saying is this. It makes me sad a little. I had no Snapchat, no Angry Birds, but I had sort of a magical childhood. “Magical” is the wrong word for it, come to think of it, because there was a lot of Windex-ing front doors and untangling plastic slinkies and picking fuzz out of Velcro shoe straps and re-writing spelling lists in my Trapper Keeper binder. No, not “magical,” in the picturesque sense.

What I mean is that it was fun being a kid. A different, yesterday-sort of fun. A sort of fun that if we don’t work at it, we may forget it. This is my attempt to remember.

How To Give Your Kid An 80s Childhood

(Step 1: Make Them Be Bored)

Now, listen. I am a former educator and children’s ministry director, a lover of books and projects and specially chosen classes. I certainly believe that our children’s minds should be stretched and their interests followed.

HOWEVER.

I also believe that boredom is one of the greatest gifts you can give to a child.

You know what I was doing during the dog days of summer when I was twelve? My four cousins and I sprawled out in Aunt Marci’s bedroom with a deck of cards, an FM radio, and a sleeve of Saltines crackers. From lunch until dinner, we listened to Shania Twain and Diamond Rio while playing War, spoons, and “Kemps” (Which is truly one of the best card games ever invited. “Double Counter Kemps” was the pinnacle of one’s achievements in those days.)

When we got sick of all card games and were down to crumbs of the Saltine crackers, we squirted each other in the face with a rubber bunny-shaped bath toy. I realize this example makes us sound like a bunch of unsocialized weirdos, but that’s kind of the whole point. We were free. There was no one watching, no need to be “cool,” nothing else we “should” or “had” to do. Nothing to Instagram or Snapchat. No millions of activities we had to be herded to and from. We could just be.

It was a blissfully lame life.

There wasn’t much to do, so we made stuff up.

We built forts out of trees, sheets, sleeping bags, boxes, dilapidated hammocks, and bales of hay. We would suck down a half a dozen Icee-pops in a day, fling the plastic at each other, lick the sugar dye off our hands.

Mom wasn’t totally against TV, but there was only so much “The Price Is Right” one could stomach, so around 1:30 or so you’d just turn it off and find something else to do.

My cousin-friends and I orchestrated a dog show, performed a talent show, charged the neighborhood for what surely was a thoroughly amusing performance of magic tricks.

In fifth grade a group of us neighborhood girls decided to fight imaginary crime by creating a detective agency in the bonus room. We used Sarah dad’s old manilla file folders and wrote out elaborate profiles of heinous villains. We just had nothing better to do than alphabetize the folders of imaginary Blockbuster-movie-store robbers.

When there weren’t any friends to play with, naturally, I decided to transform our home into a library by card-cataloguing all the books we owned. (What? Not Normal?) Every afternoon in sixth grade, I rounded up books, divided them into categories, labeled and stamped them with the date. (p.s. My husband didn’t find out about my junior-high life as a pretend librarian until after we were engaged. #sucker)

This is probably a good juncture to let you know I turned out totally normal. (Maybe not “totally,” but mostly.)

(Token picture to prove I’m not a weirdo:)

See? Normal. (Enough) And, actually, I feel this is the whole point.

Those seemingly childless, ridiculous, creative, imaginative games we played because we had nothing else better to do — we turned out alright not in spite of them, but I’d say, because of them.

The cold truth is, whether we admit it or not, the generation sleeping down the hall in the bunk beds and cribs? They’re a bunch of guinea pigs, plain and simple. There has not existed yet a generation who played Mickey Mouse Playhouse on an iPhone every single doctor’s appointment of their lives. No one has yet made it to adulthood who learned to read on an iPad app, or got selfie “likes” in fifth grade. A whole generation of kids is being schlepped from one traveling soccer team to Kumon learning class to violin lessons to whatever, and WHO IN THE WORLD KNOWS WHAT’S IT’S DOING INSIDE.

We just don’t know what this does to the brain, or heart, or mind. (And the little we do know is rather alarming — but I digress.)

I’ll say it again, mental white space (like the visual white space in your living room when you finally clean all the crap out of there) lets people breathe. MENTAL WHITE SPACE LETS YOU BREATHE. IT space inspires rest, calmness, creativity.

You can think clearly.

Here are the gifts that boredom/free time/unstructured life gives a child:

• Boredom inspires creativity.
• Boredom creates space for real friendships.
• Boredom helps grow patience, confidence, and the space to develop an internal world.

If you’re on “bored” (gosh, I couldn’t resist), there are a million and one ways to start. I won’t pretend to understand the particular inner workings of your home.

But to get your wheels turning, a few very practical suggestions:

• Make a list of all the structured activities your kids do. Draw an “x” through at least 25% of them.
• Spend one Saturday a month being together, just your family, in unscheduled play and rest.
• Get a handle on technology in the home. I will resist my very strong urge to give points of application and just say READ THIS BOOK.
• At the very least, ask yourself this question:

How was my childhood different from my kids’ childhood, and is this good or bad?

Think about that a second.

And if this mental rabbit trail ends up with fond memories of squirting people with rubber bath toys (or the awkward equivalent), don’t be afraid to give that same wonderful gift to your kids. Its name is boredom.

 

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