Boredom in School and its Effects on Your Child's Health

Ferris Buhlers Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The high school movies of my generation resonate with our own experiences in school and one core belief about what school inevitably is. It is boring. We believe that being bored in the classroom is part of the natural order of things. Not all the time, mind you, but plenty. But is this reality one we are really willing to accept for our children? Some have argued children must learn to accept it. Learning how to get through it is part of the point, right? Wrong. Overcoming boredom isn't a matter of character development. And experiencing it may not be healthy.

Boredom comes as a result of a lack of engagement. You can't learn something new if you aren't engaged in the process. Our tendency is to it is the child's responsibility to become engaged by simply "trying harder", or getting more "focused". That's like asking someone to find your bad jokes funny by practicing laughing more.

Boredom causes children to become inattentive. As all parents are aware, there are negative consequences for students who are not attentive in class and the threat of these consequences can trigger stress. Bored students feel stressed when they are called on to answer questions and they haven't been listening. They may fidget, doodle or find other methods to keep their minds active and these activities are rarely acceptable.

Many times teachers can't see past the behaviors that indicate boredom and rather than examining the environment and the activities, they begin to assign negatives to the child -- which only causes greater stress and does nothing to ameliorate the feeling of boredom. It becomes a vicious cycle where the child is expected to learn but is unable to become engaged in the lesson because it may too passive to provide the necessary stimulation to engage the brain in learning.

When children repeatedly express boredom with their studies, what they are really saying is, "Help, my brain is starting to atrophy from lack of use!" In his 1997 book, Coping with Chronic Stress, Benjamin Gottlieb points to dozens of studies which demonstrate that under-activity in the brain may trigger a health threat by promoting atrophy of nerve cells in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is important for spatial and verbal memory.

Without knowing it, children who complain of boredom are actually trying to stay healthy. According to Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, when people experience too much stress the body releases a hormone called cortisol. When people experience prolonged stress, which can conceivably happen from the tension between the expectation to achieve and the reality that lack of stimulation is making it impossible to be attentive, their bodies may produce excess cortisol, causing it to cut back on its production of other hormones, such as testosterone. Without adequate levels of testosterone, it is impossible to maintain, let alone build, muscle.

Armed with this information, parents and teachers should take it seriously when young people repeatedly express boredom with their studies. When students express that they are bored, they are not simply complaining, they are offering adults diagnostic information. They are telling us that they do not feel challenged, that their brains are not stimulated in healthy ways. So why don't we listen to these complaints?

We don't listen to the cries of boredom because we aren't sure what to do about them.

One of the main problems with our pre collegiate educational system is that while there are excellent examples of what works to engage kids, these models rarely find their way into mainstream media. If people don't know what a challenging, creative education looks like, how are they supposed to replicate it or demand it for their children?

As President Obama calls for higher standards and greater accountability, it seems the time is ripe for our nation to also take up a serious conversation about what an engaging and challenging school environment looks like for the learner. Young people are aching for engagement. We should join our voices and challenge the mainstream media to fuel this conversation by providing ongoing examples of engaging classrooms and programs. We need to demonstrate to all teachers and parents the ways schools can stimulate learning. A far as I see it, for children this is a matter of health and well being.

Comments

[waitforme]

As a psychotherapist for 25 years and as someone who spent my school years in boredom I highly recommend this article's findings. I know what being bored, not stimulated, not asked to be engaged did to me and it took me many years to recover. I think now that 'distraction syndrome' is likely a result of not having enough face-to-face connection with someone who has something they want to impart and you want to know. I was eminently curious about how the world works, but didn't know how to put my questions into words, didn't know whom to ask. Reading wasn't easy for me -- I'd get too excited at what I was learning or be uninterested in it. I learned best by watching and listening. I was one of those kids who was staring out the window and didn't have the answer to the teacher's questions because I hadn't heard anything. Part of it was anxiety-producing problems at home; but I always knew that if I could have someone smart sit down with me and have a conversation in which I could ask questions I would have been very grateful. I've passed this article on to the parents of an extra-bright child whom I know to be someone who gets depressed and bored when he is not stimulated and learning something new. When he is learning something new, getting explanations about how his world works, he can feel balanced. Thanks again for the article.

[SaraKay Smullens - Huffpost Blogger]

I have been a fan of Jennifer Fox's ground breaking, brilliant, brutally honest work in film for many years. Jennifer is ever able to capture the essence of the universal need to communicate, to love, and to preserve one's history. She is able to express all that humankind has in common, wherever we live, regardless of differences that may seem vast. In this post she shows that boredom is a cry for help, a cry for stimulation, a cry for meaningful contact. As a psychotherapist who has been in practive for over 30 years, I have learned well that to ignore this cry is to risk killing off part of the human spirit. It is neither healthy nor cool for a child to live in bordom. It is dangerous.