In the Mundane, the Power to Inspire
Isaac Sentilles, a 12-year- old in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, has been a busy boy. His mother, Renée, has made sure of that. “I enrolled him in piano at 5,” Ms. Sentilles told The Times. “I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.” Of course she did. That is what many American parents do today. And they are right there watching over their children’s shoulders for all of it — driving them to games, attending recitals, or just guiding a craft project at home whenever that can be shoehorned into the busy schedule.
This sort of something-all-thetime parenting, once the approach mainly of upper- class families, has spread across socioeconomic lines and is taking root in countries like England and Australia too. The experts do not agree on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but this is certain: The way Ms. Sentilles raises her son is different from the way she was raised.
“My job was not to entertain them,” said her mother, Claire Tassin. “My job was to love them and discipline them.”
How does she view the upbringing of her grandchildren now? “I’m not saying it doesn’t work,” said said. “They’re amazing. But I know I felt free, so free as a child. I put on my jeans and my cowboy boots and I played outside all day.”
The Times’s Pamela Paul would like to see a lot more jeans-andboots time, but she worries that too many children would not know what to do with it. Those children have always had adults making sure they never get bored.
Ms. Paul does not believe this serves the children well. Boredom, she says, is good for you.
“If kids don’t figure this out early on, they’re in for a nasty surprise,” she wrote. “School, let’s face it, can be dull, and it isn’t actually the teacher’s job to entertain as well as educate. Life isn’t meant to be an endless parade of amusements.”
But there is more value to the boredom than this get-used-toit lesson. “Things happen when you’re bored,” Ms. Paul wrote. “It’s not really the boredom itself that’s important; it’s what we do with it. When you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself. But unless we are faced with a steady diet of stultifying boredom, we never learn how.”
That learning is a continuing process. Ask the four million people who have bought copies of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” since it was first published in 1992.
The book “has been a lodestar to blocked writers and other artistic hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century,” Penelope Green wrote in The Times. Those who rely on its tenets have formed Artist’s Way groups in places from Toronto to Japan, from Brazil to Russia, from the Australian outback to the Panamanian jungle.
If not boredom, one of its central exercises at least starts with blank page: You must start each day by writing three pages about whatever comes to mind. Another regular exercise is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of alone time each week, any place that might offer a new experience.
Two hours a week may be asking too much nothingness in the schedule of busy modern children. But perhaps they can find a sliver of time if they are at least clean.
As Ms. Paul notes, “so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you’re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.”