The ultimate test of parenting is coming: the summer of boredom

Camp is cancelled, there are no classes to attend, and we are looking down the barrel of a 1970s summer break. For my kids, for the next two months, it’s a choice between the park, the park, a trip to the supermarket, or the park. (I mean screens, too; but I’m trying not to think about that.) When I was their age, these options were standard. If you were very unlucky, you might get a week or two in a half-arsed summer play-scheme, where you were made to play rounders and do cutting and sticking. Beyond that, however, the summer was yours, and it delivered what is by today’s standards an outlandish luxury: boredom.

After five years of raising kids in New York, it has taken some effort on my part to see things this way. The term “enrichment”, a word to strike fear into every parental heart, is the rat race of ballet, music, swimming lessons, summer camp, that murder our finances and wear out our children. (I drew the line at sodding ice-skating, and no one in my house will ever go near a horse. But prior to the pandemic, the other stuff appeared in our lives in heavy rotation.)

We know the downside to all this. It overstimulates the kids. It doesn’t allow them room to breathe, or space to develop. Children these days show the slightest interest in something and off we go, signing them up for 52 after-school classes, until the life is thoroughly crushed out of it.

As adults, we also know the advantages of “boredom”. Every self-help book about creativity there is sells us the virtues of unstructured downtime. If you want to create, you must permit the brain to be “bored”, thus allowing it time to process and rejuvenate. Just look at Tennyson, going off on his walks to iron out the wrinkles in Maud. The same principle, we tell ourselves, surely applies to our kids. Leave your children alone this summer and watch them turn into the Brontes! By September, guaranteed, they’ll have developed entire worlds and be communicating with each other via mirror writing.

There are a couple of issues here. The first is the fugitive desire to hack boredom for a higher purpose. If there’s a self-improvement element involved, my hunch is that, like anxiously telling yourself to relax, the stated aim of “doing nothing” doesn’t land. “Results, I want results!” doesn’t sit well alongside a desire to opt out of regarding everything as a means to an end.

The other problem for parents this holiday is that there’s more than one type of boredom. It’s very possible that a pandemic summer of no formal activities for the kids will allow them to enjoy a wonderful stretch of untimetabled free time. It does, however, mean that you, their parent, will have to resign yourself to the different type of boredom of being their number one source of entertainment.

“Mummy, be the rabbit.” Oh, God. I don’t want to be the rabbit. I want to sit, with my coffee, staring out of the window, doing structural boredom like the self-help gurus say. I don’t want to do the boredom of being the voice of a plastic rabbit who’s going to the shops or the doctor’s surgery again.

It’s not that I don’t like playing. I can happily spend hours playing board games with my kids. I can talk to them about nothing until the cows come home. I can go on endless day trips, and I can watch them for hours in the park, just as long as I don’t have to do too long on the swings.

But there’s something about imaginative play with figurines – the tiny scope of it, the demand, on my kids’ part, that we stick to an endlessly rebooting script, with tyrannical outbursts if I have the gall to break character – that short-circuits my brain. “Mum, be the mum.” “We’re still in the game.” “MUM.”

I’m trying to lean into this. Perhaps it’s the ultimate test. If I can truly leave ballet and music behind to embrace “be the rabbit”, I might simultaneously cure myself of overweening ambition for my kids and enter some zen state of pure boredom. Just as long as it improves us. It will improve us, right?

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist