A summer of down time: how can three months with nothing to do be good for teenagers?
Inevitably this meant doing extremely boring chores, which went no way towards alleviating my boredom. It was a lesson to my siblings and I to say nothing in future, because if there's one thing worse than having nothing to do, it's having dishes or ironing to do. Still doesn't stop me from threatening my own beloved offspring with a similar fate, dare they mention the b word.
I try to avoid it at all costs, but it's not always easy. For some bizarre reason, things like meditation apps are suggested to me through social-media algorithms. A quiet mind is a luxury I can't afford. There's far too much overthinking to be done. Plus, aren't those quieter moments in between catastrophising previous conversations intended for working out what's for dinner, how to ease the guilt of working when the kids are off school, and deciding what to write about next week?
Boredom saps the energy out of me. Yet, somehow, we've packaged it as a good thing – even beneficial – for our kids.
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I'm not buying it. And I didn't from the off. I once took my newborn daughter to the GP for her two week old check-up and, when asked how she was getting on, mentioned that I was a bit concerned. 'I lie her on the play mat and she gets very restless and upset within a few minutes,' I said. 'I think she's a bit bored, to be honest.' My GP at the time looked at me in mild disbelief.
Knowing my daughter, all these years on I still maintain that that was a distinct possibility. It's probably no harm that I changed GP shortly after that.
Now we often hear how it's good for kids to be bored, and how overscheduling our children is not a good thing, And I can wholeheartedly get on board with that last bit. Not least because it eases any guilt I might feel about not being able to afford the time or money to overschedule my children, even if I was so inclined. But the bored bit – well that depends on how long it's for. Short enough that children feel inspired to become creative and find positive ways to escape that boredom, ideally in our minds discovering the joy of free play. That's the goal. But long enough to become demotivated or disconnected, well that's a whole other situation. And one we seem content to leave our teens navigate, without much thought.
A Unicef report, published earlier this year, revealed Irish teens to be in the bottom half in the developed world for wellbeing. A statistic often overlooked in favour of the more positive ones around academic achievement and third-level progression. But, ultimately, is the most important thing, to all parents, not that their children are happy?
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I'm paying €757 to keep my child busy for 3.6 hours a day. Summer childcare maths doesn't add up
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And although overall wellbeing is far more complex than being bored over the summer holidays, the fact that we have no real structure to support our teens over the three months (3½, if you have a transition year student) shows how little thought is given to them. Much like with the school closures during the pandemic that affected our teens so severely.
If you're a teenager under 18, summer jobs can be hard to come by. So, what are teenagers up to this summer? While some lucky teens had secured a few hours work on farms or in summer camps, for many parents, the lack of something to do, was a source of concern and frustration. 'Sleeping a ridiculous amount', 'very little', 'feck-all', '[on the] phone', 'playing Fifa', 'staying in bed most of the day', 'a lot of Xbox', came the replies from parents describing how their teens' summer was playing out.
And it's easy to see how.
With youth clubs largely a thing of the past, summer camps geared mostly towards children of primary school age, employers less keen on hiring younger teens, and groups of teenagers 'hanging out' viewed with suspicion, the appeal of bed or a retreat to the online world is somewhat understandable.
Which raises the question: is three months of very little to do, and few places for teens to gather with their friends and peers, really good for teenagers?
Summer camps and childcare may be the focus of many primary school parents' summer juggle concerns at the moment. But it's time we brought teens in on the conversation too.
Because boredom is no fun.
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Photograph: Tom Honan In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores how smartphones fuel insecurity and encourage constant social comparison among young people. Haidt believes great structural strides must be taken – by placing responsibility on governments and technology companies – to protect young people from their smartphones. Many Irish professionals working in education and mental health agree. 'It's causing mayhem in our school and I'm sure in lots of other schools that are not discussing it because we're caught between a rock and a hard place because of confidentiality,' says Mary*, a primary schoolteacher in Munster. 'We've seen first-hand the impact it's having on very young children after Holy Communion when they're being given access to mobile phones. It's impacting their mental health, their social interactions. 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'Before opening certain apps, you can get a timer and you have to wait for a bit before opening the app. I also got an app called NoScroll – you can block certain websites. You can block YouTube shorts in YouTube – that solved that issue for me: a lot of the things posted there are just TikToks, posted in YouTube.' [ Excessive use of social media creating generation of 'broken people', psychiatrist says Opens in new window ] McLoughlin has a Gameboy for his long bus journeys to college. 'If I want to entertain myself, I have a specific game, a piece of media, that I'm going to engage in, and I'm controlling the environment,' he says. And he has a notepad, not a Notes app. 'I'll write things down physically on paper. I'll keep my notepad with me all the time.' Brocklebank has spent a lot of time reflecting on the hold his phone once had on him, and what it means to him to have freedom from it. Letting his phone run out of battery helps him appreciate the magnitude of the spell that was once cast on him. 'One day I was standing in the rain and my phone died and I was like, 'Oh, I'm holding a brick now,'' he relates. 'It took away a lot of the phone's power.' As for Nuala Whittle in Berlin? She has a sharper, more brutal tactic to reduce her smartphone use. 'Throw it,' she says, with a laugh. 'When you want to stop using your phone, launch it as far away from you as you can towards a surface that won't break it. If you're on the bed, throw it on to the couch. If you're on the couch, throw it on to the carpet. And then, if you're really comfortable in the chair, just rely on the fact that you're so comfortable that you don't want to get up.' 'Sometimes you have to do silly things,' Whittle concludes. 'Literally: just throw it away.' *Mary's name has been changed.
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