When the child gets bored, the parents get discouraged. It is difficult to understand how it is possible that children and young people who have games and electronic devices of all kinds do not know how to occupy their free time. Boredom is not caused by the absence of stimuli or opportunities as everyone thinks. To cope with boredom it is not enough to propose new toys, new stimuli, new pre-packaged activities. Children from very early childhood are inundated with objects and tasks that only require passively used or performed. In this way our little ones do not get used to imagining a goal to be achieved, to plan how to get there and to commit to obtain the desired result. As children grow up, especially in adolescence, the inability and difficulty of planning personal and meaningful activities in which to engage generates a profound discomfort that must not be overlooked because it can be at the origin of risky behaviors.

If the child is bored, ask them to commit to achieving a goal that must obviously be meaningful to them. It is not important if the proposals start from the children or from the parents, but it is necessary to understand and evaluate what they are most interested in, push them to choose between different alternatives, help them set a specific goal, organize the various stages to achieve it and finally commit to achieve the result they have set for themselves. This is true both for activities that take place inside the home, as a hobby, and for those outside the home, in sports, in voluntary work, in the parish, in the neighborhood.

From an early age, avoid overwhelming children with toys, especially the very structured ones that get used to passivity and simple execution, thus leaving no room for creativity, personal action and planning. When your children get bored it will be necessary to propose a clear goal to be reached through their personal commitment. Boredom is faced by cultivating new hobbies, doing a job for oneself or for others, learning new actions useful for life.

Engaging in the most common activities of home and family life can also be a solution to boredom. Children feel involved in family life and not excluded (which frequently occurs).