The recipe for interesting children? Boredom

The funny thing about school holidays is that I don’t remember my parents featuring much in them.

Of course they were there on the two-week trip to a villa in Corfu, but the rest of the time, when I was a baby mouse in London, where were they? They were working, I think. They are both baby boomers and were far more interested in their careers or their latest enthusiasms than in us. My brother and I were left alone, and that was good. Friends knocked on the door and off we went on our bicycles.

Today, because of the ubiquitous screen, cars and higher levels of anxiety, parents have two options. Let the children be stimulated by computer games, social media and whatever other horrors come to them via their multiple devices and screens. Or take some time out and entertain them yourself. That means full concentration and playing a board game, inventing a quiz or playing football with them. That’s a lot of work.

The best option – when children are left to their own devices, get bored, make up their own games and ramble the streets in gangs, while the parents drink cocktails and doze in the sun – no longer seems to exist. If you want healthy, self-sufficient offspring, D H Lawrence said, ‘Leave the child alone.’ Stop trying to dictate to them. Let them be bored.

That’s the theme of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s new book about school summer holidays between 1930 and 1980, British Summer Time Begins (reviewed on page 53). She captures the deep dullness of the holidays – and how the boredom helped us to develop our minds.

But boredom has been eliminated by the overlords of Silicon Valley. No one has time to be bored, because they are all thrown such a lot of entertaining stuff – with advertising attached. What sort of effect does this have on the creative mind of the child? It was the spectacularly hands-off parenting style of Lord and Lady Redesdale that led to the flowering of the imagination of young Nancy Mitford. The sisters, when they were not being hunted by their father and his bloodhounds, spent all day making up games and special languages, taking refuge in the Hons’ cupboard and reading.

Funnily enough, the overlords of Silicon Valley themselves do not allow their kids to waste all day on screens. Take Evan Spiegel. He is America’s youngest billionaire, married to the incredibly beautiful and rich model and organic-skincare-products CEO Miranda Kerr. His business, Snapchat, is used by 186 million people, mainly kids, every day. The couple have a baby and a seven-year-old, Flynn, from Kerr’s previous marriage to actor Orlando Bloom. An interviewer for the Financial Times recently asked Spiegel his policy on screen time. It turns out he had a Mitfordian childhood: his parents didn’t have a TV till he was a teenager.

‘I actually thought that was valuable because I spent a lot of time just building stuff and reading or whatever,’ he said.

As a result, Kerr and Spiegel allow their seven-year-old only one and a half hours of screen time per week, so she can build stuff and read or whatever.

Young Spiegel is spot-on. In my case, acres of time yawned in front of us during the summer hols. We had a babysitter, aged only 16, who would ignore us while she snogged her boyfriends in my parents’ sitting room. She also took us on long rambles through Richmond Park. I read comics for hours with my friend Simon. First Tintin and Asterix, and later The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. At my grandparents’ house, my brother and I would spend hours creating alien worlds out of plastic counters while my grandfather dozed and my grandmother cleaned.

With all this time on our hands, we kids also started making magazines. The Penguin, the King’s House Times (named after my prep school) and the Sixth-form Rag were some of our early collaborative projects. I also used to bang a tennis ball against the wall for hours, and as a teenager would gaze at album sleeves while lying on my bed and playing each record again and again. ‘Doing nothing often leads to the best kind of something,’ as that Taoist sage Winnie-the-pooh wisely notes in the recent Pooh movie.

There was a lot of inactivity. In fact, it used to irritate my mother, on the occasions she witnessed it. ‘That’s what annoyed me about you and your brother,’ she tells me now. ‘The lolling.’

We used to saunter through the streets of Richmond with no purpose. And sauntering is a wonderful activity. It has its roots in medieval pilgrimage. When villagers asked pilgrims where they were headed, the wanderers would reply, ‘ À la sainte terre’ – to the holy land. They became known as saunterers.

In other words, boredom is next to godliness.

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler (www.idler.co.uk)

‘If you want healthy, self-sufficient offspring … let them be bored’