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Nothing to Do
Helping Your Preteen Beat Boredom By Sue Marquette Poremba
Debbie Mandel, host of the Turn on Your Inner Light radio show, suggests other possible activities that adolescents can pursue with the encouragement of their parents:
- Learning to play a musical instrument. (Encourage them to practice when the house is empty. When I was first learning how to play my flute, I was flustered by the thought someone was listening to me make mistakes. But when the house was empty, I played for hours.)
- Exercise to get them de-stressed and energized in a positive way.
- Arts and crafts can help them unwind after an intellectual school day by creatively working with their hands. The possibilities are endless, and your child is learning to express himself outside the box.
- Volunteer work sparks kindness, self-esteem and redirects antisocial energy toward the community. Your child will see herself benevolently reflected in someone else's eyes.
It may also be helpful to have an idea of just how much free time you do have. Psychologist Nancy Irwin has a simple system for organizing time. "It is called Living in Domains and requires coloring in blocks of time in a date book/calendar and treating each block as if it were vitally important and it is," she says.
"You have one block for school, home/work, sports/health, spirituality, free time, etc. Whatever is important to you, you set it up and honor it. You'd be shocked and amazed how much time we all waste it is blindingly obvious."
"Adolescence is the age for autonomy," Caldwell says. "This is the time to do whatever we can to help them learn to make good decisions with their free time."