"I'm Bored" - When did boredom become a reason to quit, and why are parents so quick to rescue children from it?

Nov 01, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

(Kaieteur News) – A Guyanese child today can be sitting in a room containing more entertainment than her grandparents encountered in a lifetime. Games, videos, music, cartoons, an endless stream of colourful distractions flowing from a screen in her hand. And somewhere in the middle of all that abundance comes the sentence every parent knows. “I’m bored.” Increasingly, that declaration seems to require an immediate response from an adult. Find something entertaining, change the activity, provide another device, or, if the child is enrolled in a class or programme, consider withdrawing the child because he or she is no longer interested. I worry about this. When did boredom become an emergency, and when did we decide that children should only participate in activities they find continuously entertaining?

I grew up in a household of readers. Both my mother and father were avid readers, and so were all my siblings. I was a voracious reader. Books were simply part of our lives. My father read constantly, my mother read, and reading was as normal in our home as eating or having a conversation. Nobody had to convince me that books were good for my vocabulary or that reading would improve my examination scores. I read because I loved reading, because books were available, and because everyone around me read. I could disappear into a book for hours, exploring places I had never visited and becoming absorbed in the lives of people I would never meet. And when I wasn’t reading? I found something else to do. My parents were not employed as my personal entertainment coordinators. If I announced that I was bored, I certainly did not expect the entire household to reorganise itself around my discomfort.