When I was a child, the quickest way to get a rise from an adult was to say, “I’m bored.” Off they’d go, raging about how spoiled and ungrateful you were, or how only the boring got bored. It was a version of the 1980s lecture given to the child who wouldn’t finish his dinner – the standard “there are starving people in the world” – designed to guilt and shame into obedience. It didn’t work, really, but one could see why they did it.
Anxieties move on. These days, after spending too long reading essays about parenting, most of us understand that structural boredom is a necessity, a buffer against overstimulation. A bored child is a happy child, or at least a child whose social and emotional development has been given enough breathing space for their imagination to flourish and increase their chances of getting a job, one day, that hasn’t been outsourced to artificial intelligence.
Children, with their sixth sense for the hang-ups of the adults around them, have had to find new ways to enrage us. When I was young you weren’t supposed to be weedy about losing, and you might get shouted at for giving up, but that’s not how we do things now. We are simultaneously worried about our children’s resilience while understanding that yelling at them doesn’t improve the outcome.
For a while, my kids experimented with the phrase “I can’t do it,” which annoyed me, but I managed to be bright and relatively normal about it. Then, the other day, one of them hit the jackpot. In the throes of a meltdown about which pair of tights she wanted to wear that day, she yelled – with a curiously English idiom, given she has lived all her five years in the US – “Everybody thinks I’m rubbish!”
Well. That got me going for some minutes. First I was furious – how many bloody hours have I put in to avoid you coming to precisely this conclusion – then I backed up into a panicked “That’s ridiculous!”, then got furious again. My other child stood to one side, looking on impassively. A day later, having observed the miraculous effect brought about by this phrase from her twin, she came out with the same line. And that got me going all over again.
I can see how they got there. It’s good to talk to your kids, but I have a feeling we will look back on this time as the age of banging on too much to our children. I’m constantly momsplaining to them, picking apart every small action in a ceaseless torrent of communication. Not just, “Oh, look! A robin!” But endless parsing of their motivation, and policing any signs of failure to follow through or be happy. It’s like a nonstop Nike ad campaign. On and on and on I go, making them listen, with a life lesson attached to every small thing. No period of quiet reflection is permitted.
A year ago, I started banging on about something. I can’t remember what it was now, something to do with how people believe different things and that’s OK. After listening to me patiently for a few moments, my four-year-old put her hand kindly on my arm. “Let’s talk about it later,” she said.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
