The Case for Doing Nothing

Boredom terrifies modern parents. The instinct is to fill every silence with an activity, every car ride with a screen, every afternoon with a program. But neuroscience tells a different story.

For most of history, children had long stretches of unstructured time by default — not by design. The difference today is not that children are less creative. It is that we have eliminated the empty space where creativity used to grow.