Do you have a vision of the person you’d like for your child to become?
If so, how will they get there? Will their journey be driven by your motivation, or will their motivation come from within? Perhaps they already have their own vision?
When we allow our children to experience boredom, you may get the opportunity to see how these questions might be answered today.
To develop depth of character, Marvel movies tend to use a portion of their stories to show how a featured hero(ine) would overcome challenges without superpowers. This kind of plot allows the story writer to explore the essence of the fictionalized individual underneath the mask or costume. “Who are they really? Or, who will they become without the distraction of outward appearances?” Likewise, we could ask ourselves the same questions, by replacing the Marvel plot twist with those moments when we feel like we have nothing do.
When we realize our momentary boredom, our minds and bodies slow down and retreat from the external world. Consequently, we are more internally focused. We then arrive at a decision point– will we seek out another external stimulus or remain focused inward? What is your inclination? If you decide to maintain your focus inward, what happens? What kinds of thoughts and motivations percolate inside your mind?
Those thoughts and motivations likely influence how you respond when your child tells you they are bored. Just like the times we used to instinctively reach for a bottle when we heard them cry as babies, or perhaps the times we now reach for our phone when we are bored, we likely reach for another “external stimulus” to help them. It is in those moments when they are “left to their own devices”, however, that we can gain insight into the deepest source of our child’s motivation
“Intrinsic” or self-motivation is a desire to accomplish goals based on one’s own ambition or one’s own need to satisfy curiosity. By contrast, “extrinsic motivation” describes when the pursuit of goals is sparked (or demanded) by others. In a review of research published back in 1983, author Adele Eskeles Gottfired explored different conditions that spark intrinsic motivation (article title, Intrinsic Motivation in Young Children).
Several of the conditions involve the ways that children interact with the world:
- When they are exposed to diverse situations (scenarios that offer problems to solve), Gottfried suggests that young minds obtain the motivation to find answers that explain their experiences.
- She also found that children seek to master those situations, or to become adept at functioning in them.
- A third factor she notes is that children need to believe that the actions they engage in based on their own motivation will have an impact on their world.
Of course, the younger a child is, the more supervision they need. However, being aware of the conditions Gottfried found can provide a foundation for you to use as you strategize ahead of the next moment of boredom. Such strategies could include:
- Providing spaces or zones at home that are designated for creativity or exploration (see: Creative Spaces to Learn). When everyone is working at home, this is more difficult. When space is tight, it may simply mean moving the bills off of the dining room table, or creating temporary spaces that will be reused for other purposes later;
- Creating a list of projects (along with tools to go with them) for your child to choose from where the result will be visible to and impactful on the family.
- Building a reward structure that conveys your praise for their accomplishment and could be exchanged for something else they value like video game play (time tokens).
Schools have gotten their footing underneath the prospect of remote learning, and have produced a lot of “busy work” for students: work packs, digital experiences, etc. Some of this work may even go beyond the formal curricula. By having a vision for your child, it can help put all of the busy work into perspective.
Special note: your observations of your child during times of boredom may be indicating something else regarding their capacity to learn or to exhibit executive function (self-regulation, planning, and focus). Knowing the difference should be handled with great care. I will address that topic in a later post.
If you are looking for a vision to use, one possibility might come from an essay written by William Cronin called, “Only Connect“. We heard the essay discussed during Amherst College’s 2019 convocation. One of our sons just finished his freshman year at the school. The end of his essay offers a list of goals that we all can consider adopting for our children and ourselves, whether we attended college or not. As someone who still has a strong desire to learn, I found the essay immensely applicable.
Below I have organized that list of goals into 10 “bite-sized sections” that you can skim by header now and then return to later. As you read them, you might find that these attributes would only hold up as virtues if they come from within.
Attributes of liberally educated people according to Cronin:
“Liberal education” …. aspires to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom.
1. They listen and they hear.
Educated people know how to pay attention—to others and the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear emotions that lie behind both the logic and illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person feeling those emotions.
2. They read and they understand.
Educated people can appreciate not only the front page of the New York Times, but also the arts section, and the business section, and the editorials. They are moved by what they see in an art museum and what they hear in a concert hall. They recognize extraordinary athletic achievements; they are engaged by classic and contemporary works of theater and cinema. None of us can possible master all these forms of “reading”, but educated people should be competent in many of them and curious about all of them.
3. They can talk with anyone.
Educated people know how to talk. They can give a speech, ask thoughtful questions, and make people laugh. They can hold a conversation with a high school dropout or a Nobel laureate, a child or a nursing home resident, a factory worker or a corporate president. Moreover, they participate in such conversations not because they like to talk about themselves, but because they are genuinely interested in others….”try to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does”.
4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.
What goes for talking goes for writing as well: educated people know the craft of putting words on paper. I’m not talking about parsing a sentence or composing a paragraph, but about expressing what is in their minds and hearts so as to teach, persuade, and move the person who happens to read their words.
5. They can solve a variety of puzzles and problems.
The ability to solve puzzles requires many skills, including a basic comfort with numbers, a familiarity with computers, and the recognition that many problems that appear to turn on the questions of quality can in fact be reinterpreted as subtle problems of quantity. These are the skills of the analyst, the manager, the engineer, the critic: the ability to look at a complicated reality, break it into pieces, and figure out how it works in order to do practical things in the real world. Part of the challenge in this, or course, is the ability to put reality back together again after having broken it into pieces—for only by doing so can we accomplish practical goals without violating the integrity of the world we are trying to change.
6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake, but as a way of seeking truth.
Truly educated people love learning, but they love wisdom more. The can appreciate a closely reasoned argument without being unduly impressed by mere logic. They understand that knowledge serves values, and they strive to put these two—knowledge and values—into constant dialogue with each other
7. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.
This is another way of saying that they can understand the power of other people’s dreams and nightmares as well as their own. They have intellectual range and emotional generosity to step outside of their own experiences and prejudices, thereby opening themselves to perspectives different from their own. Without such encounters, we cannot learn how much people differ—and how much they have common.
8. They understand how to get things done in the world.
Learning how to get things done in the world in order to leave it a better place is surely one of the most practical and important lessons we can learn from our education. It is fraught with peril because the power to act in the world can so easily be abused—but we fool ourselves if we think we can avoid acting, avoiding exercising power, avoid joining the world’s fight. And so we study power and struggle to use it wisely and well.
9. They nurture and empower the people around them.
Nothing is more important in tempering the exercise of power and shaping right action than the recognition that no one ever acts alone. Liberally educated people understand that they belong to a community whose prosperity and well-being are crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by making the success of others possible.
10. They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howard’s End: “Only connect”
More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities described prior: Listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people’s eyes, leading, working in a community—is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect.
