The Hidden Engine of Holidays: Why Boredom Is the Best Plan
The idea of “doing nothing” and allowing children to be bored often clashes directly with a very adult kind of guilt. We live in a culture of hyper-productivity and, when holidays arrive, we tend to pour that same inertia onto childhood: camps, outings, visits, activities, stimuli and plans so that children “make the most of their time”.
But perhaps this is where an important confusion begins. Making the most of time does not always mean filling it. Sometimes, especially in childhood, making the most of time means leaving enough space for something of one’s own to appear.
From the point of view of child development, emptying the schedule can have enormous neurobiological, emotional and creative value. This is not about abandoning children or ignoring them. It is about offering them something that is becoming increasingly rare today: time without instructions, without performance, without immediate entertainment and without an adult solution prepared before the need even appears.
Boredom, although uncomfortable at first, may be one of the great hidden engines of holidays.
Boredom as a neurological engine
When a child does not have an external stimulus telling them what to do —a screen, an entertainer, a directed activity or a battery-powered toy—, their brain goes through an uncomfortable but necessary transition. At first, the complaint usually appears: “I’m bored”. That sentence, which triggers in many adults the need to offer an immediate solution, is also a sign that the mind is looking for a quick dose of stimulation.
The problem appears when we solve it too soon.
If every time a child gets bored an adult appears with a screen, an activity or an instruction, the child learns that emptiness must always be filled from the outside. But if adults resist the temptation to solve the problem immediately, something much more interesting can begin: the brain starts looking for its own paths.
In these moments, what is known as the default mode network becomes active. It is a set of connected brain regions that switches on when we stop focusing on an external task and our attention is no longer completely captured by the outside world. To put it simply, this network appears when we look out of a bus window, drift off, daydream or let the mind wander without an immediate goal.
If you are driving through a busy street, your directed attention is working intensely and this network moves into the background. But when you sit and look at the landscape without needing to do anything specific, this other mental activity switches on. The brain begins to process experiences, connect ideas that seemed separate, imagine possibilities, revisit memories, rehearse scenes and build new associations.
This is one of the natural territories of creativity.
Boredom is not simply the absence of stimulation. It is the empty space the mind needs in order to begin filling itself from within. For a child, that space can become a door into invention, symbolic play and world-building.
From dependence to autonomy
When the schedule is hyper-programmed, the child often remains in a passive position. Not because they do not enjoy the activities, and not because organized plans are bad in themselves, but because in that kind of dynamic there is almost always someone else designing the experience for them. The child follows instructions, responds to stimuli, adapts to schedules and participates in a structure that has already been decided.
By contrast, when a moment of transition, emptiness or apparent “doing nothing” appears, a very important question emerges: “What do I feel like doing now?”. That question may seem simple, but for a child it can be a huge exercise in self-knowledge, autonomy and decision-making.
Choosing what to do when nobody tells you what to do is a basic form of freedom.
It is also a form of intelligence. The child has to look around, recognize their desires, evaluate possibilities, invent an action, sustain an idea and modify it if it does not work. Through that process, they discover something fundamental: the origin of their fun and wellbeing is not always in an external agent, in a purchased object or in an organized plan. It can be inside them.
For ByBa, this point is central. Creativity does not appear only when a child produces something visible, such as a drawing, a story or a construction. It also appears when they learn to generate possibility in a space that seemed empty. It appears when they turn “I don’t know what to do” into “I can try this”. It appears when they discover that their mind does not need to receive everything ready-made in order to start moving.
The power of the unstructured object
When children decide what to play with using what they have at hand —sticks, stones, a cardboard box, the sheets on a hotel bed or a beach towel—, they move from functional play to symbolic play. And that shift is deeply creative.
A toy with lights, sounds and very defined functions usually rules over the game. It tells the child what it is, how it is used and what kind of response it expects. It can be fun, of course, but it also leaves less room for transforming its meaning.
A wooden stick, on the other hand, can be a fishing rod, a wand, a tool for digging in the sand, the mast of a ship, an invisible sword or a border drawn on the ground. A cardboard box can be a house, a spaceship, a shop, a hiding place, a time machine or a shelter for imaginary animals. The unstructured object does not close the game; it opens it.
This does not only multiply inventiveness. It also makes children more resourceful, because it pushes them to adapt the environment to their play needs instead of waiting for the environment to deliver a finished experience. The child does not simply consume a function: they create one.
There is a huge lesson here for creative intelligence. Creating does not always mean producing something from scratch, but looking at what is available in another way and finding a new possibility within it.
The paradox of holidays
The paradox of holidays is that fewer programmed activities does not mean neglecting children. It may mean exactly the opposite: trusting their capacities.
Trusting that they can move through the initial discomfort of boredom. Trusting that they can invent a game, sustain a scene, explore an object, ask themselves a question, move between ideas and discover something about themselves when nobody tells them exactly what to do.
This does not mean that holidays should become a total absence of plans, limits or adult presence. Children need care, presence and structure. But they also need spaces where structure does not occupy everything, where the adult does not anticipate every need and where time is not completely organized before it even begins.
Sometimes, the best plan is to leave a gap.
A gap for an idea to appear. A gap for the child to listen to themselves. A gap for play not to arrive pre-packaged. A gap for imagination to switch on its own engine.
In an age that tends to fill every minute, allowing boredom may almost look like negligence. But perhaps it is one of the deepest forms of trust.
Because when we give a child unstructured time, we are not giving them “nothing”. We are giving them the space to discover who they are when nobody tells them what to do.
And in that discovery, very often, creativity begins.
Clody