Should we rescue kids from boredom?

The car ride is twenty minutes and she has already said she is bored. There is a tablet in the bag. The question is whether handing it over costs anything.

The study people usually cite here is small and worth reading honestly. Mann and Cadman asked 80 adults to do something genuinely tedious — copying numbers out of a phone book — and then set them a creative task: think of as many uses as possible for a pair of polystyrene cups. The bored group produced more ideas than the control group. A second condition, where participants only read the numbers rather than copying them, scored higher still.

That is the whole finding. Eighty adults, one lab session, one creativity measure, and a boring task that lasted minutes rather than a childhood. It does not show that boredom builds creative children. It shows that a short spell of tedium preceded better divergent-thinking scores in university-age adults on one afternoon.

What makes it worth mentioning anyway is the direction of the effect. The intuitive story — that an under-stimulated mind goes flat and produces less — is the opposite of what happened. Whatever is going on when someone runs out of input, it is not simple shutdown. The authors read it as daydreaming: with nothing arriving from outside, attention turns inward and starts generating.

So I would not tell you that boredom is good for your child. The evidence is not strong enough for a sentence that confident, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What I would say is that the case for reflexively ending it is weaker than it feels in the moment. The tablet is not rescuing her from harm. It is filling a gap whose contents are unknown.

Next time the twenty-minute gap opens, let it run once and see what she does with it. Not as a rule — as an experiment with a sample size of one.

The founding wave is open.