Every parent knows the phrase. If you’re lucky, you might only hear it once in a while. But for some of us, it’s something that can be heard weekly, if not daily. My kids have had days where there’s a sports game in the morning, a birthday party in the afternoon, an impromptu friend hang, dinner together, and then a movie, and as soon as the living room is cleared of friends, one of them will inevitably say it….Mom, I’m bored.
A State or a Trait
Boredom is something we’ve all experienced. Boredom is a state of feeling restless or uninspired because something about your current situation lacks stimulation, challenge, or meaning. At least that’s what the internet says. Scientists think of boredom in a bit more complicated way (as scientists usually do). According to psychologists, boredom can be a state—which is something about the current situation you’re in. But it can also be a trait, something about your personality, or how susceptible you are to feeling bored, with some people feeling boredom easily, and others feeling boredom more rarely. Either way, boredom is something that most people generally find unpleasant. So unpleasant that people will do some crazy things to avoid it.
In one classic set of studies, researchers asked college students to spend 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do. They were told to entertain themselves with their thoughts, and the only rules were to stay seated and awake. As you can imagine, young adults didn’t like this very much. In fact, in one version of the study, they were given the option to administer a mild but unpleasant electric shock to themselves while they were just sitting there as a break from their own thoughts. Note, the electric shock was unpleasant enough that people were willing to actually pay money to avoid it. But when given the option to shock themselves or simply be left alone with their thoughts, 25 percent of women and a whopping 67 percent of men chose the shock (Wilson et al., 2014). You read that correctly: Many of these college students would rather give themselves electric shocks than face boredom. That’s some intense dislike.
Is Boredom Harmful?
My question (and the question on lots of parents’ minds) is whether boredom is actually a bad thing, especially for our kids. Sure, being bored is well—boring—but is it harmful?
It turns out that the kind of boredom that is associated with personality—trait boredom—isn’t great. It can reduce our motivation to do things; it can lead to financial risk-taking and unhealthy eating and substance use. It’s also associated with depression and anxiety (Perone et al., 2026). This probably rings true for a lot of us. When I’m bored, I shop online, and I eat Taco Bell. It’s no wonder that boredom is associated with financial risk-taking and unhealthy eating.
But what about state boredom? The research on this is a little fuzzier, but there is some evidence that experiencing boredom helps kids learn how to deal with being bored, which could be a very positive thing. In one study, researchers asked 4- to 6-year-old children and their parents about what it’s like to be bored, and then actually gave kids a boring task to complete. Some parents were more likely to intervene when they heard that inevitable “I’m bored, mom!” while others were more likely to let their kids figure it out for themselves. Importantly, the parents who let their kids figure out how to resolve their own boredom showed activity in the brain associated with approach when given a boring task to do. This suggests that the kids who were left to deal with boredom on their own were more likely to cope with it proactively than the kids whose parents were more likely to intervene (Perone et al., 2026). Indeed, when kids are left on their own to deal with boredom, they tend to come up with activities to occupy their time. As a result, the authors concluded that boredom can potentially help children develop self-regulation and coping strategies (Anderson & Perone, 2024).
So should we intervene when our children are bored? The answer is not necessarily. Giving them a little bit of space to generate their own solutions to boredom is a great first step, as it could help them build coping strategies to deal with boredom on their own. If they have trouble, you could help them by scaffolding some potential solutions. So instead of saying “Here’s what you could do,” maybe ask them, “What are a few things you might want to do?” and then help them generate some ideas from there. The idea isn’t necessarily to help prevent boredom, but to help them learn how to tolerate the unpleasantness of being bored and to figure out some solutions on their own. This will hopefully help them cope with feelings that are unpleasant, and maybe even build some creativity in the process.
