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Nothing to Do
Helping Your Preteen Beat Boredom By Sue Marquette Poremba
After a week's vacation with their grandparents, I asked my son if he had a good time with his cousin. He shrugged. "If we were on the beach, we had fun," he said. "But the rest of the time he played with his GameBoy. It was like he didn't know how to do anything else."
My nephew, apparently, was overwhelmed by having free time, and he's not alone. Children today tend to be so over-scheduled that when they have free time, they don't know what to do.
However, the inclination toward this high school mischief-making actually begins during the preteen years, when children are left unsupervised for the first time.
Most adolescents spent their preschool and elementary school years under constant supervision and in structured activities. Then comes age 10 or 11, and parents decide this is a good age to allow their child some freedom unfamiliar freedom. After the excitement of being alone sets in (in about five minutes), boredom takes over.
"We want children to learn how to avoid the boredom," says Caldwell, who has helped to develop a program called TimeWise, a curriculum-based leisure education program. "Parents need to help their adolescents learn how to make good choices on how to spend their free time."
