A book can help with
For the child draped over the sofa moaning that there’s nothing to do.
‘I’m boooored.’ Few sentences empty a parent’s patience faster. But boredom isn’t the enemy it’s cracked up to be. It’s often the restless, fertile space right before a child invents something, and the urge to fill every gap for them can quietly rob them of learning to fill it themselves.
A book can nudge without nagging. Some of these celebrate a bored child stumbling into an adventure of their own making, which plants the lovely idea that boredom is a doorway rather than a dead end. Read one, then hand them a cardboard box and see what happens.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Nothing to do
A bored toddler is usually a toddler waiting to be handed an idea. Neither of these is really a story, more an invitation, which is exactly the point at this age.
Baby Bear is at a loose end, finds a cardboard box and an old colander, and is on the moon within a few pages. Small children tend to take it as an instruction. Expect the nearest box to be requisitioned shortly afterwards.
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Press the yellow dot, turn the page, and the dot has multiplied. Shake the book, tilt it, blow on it. There is no story and no screen, and a two-year-old will start again the moment you reach the end.
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Making their own fun
For little ones this is about the magic that turns up the moment they stop waiting to be entertained. These are a nudge towards inventing their own.
To everyone else it’s just a cardboard box, but to the rabbit it’s a racing car, a mountain, a burning building to put out. It’s the purest possible ode to a child’s imagination, and it says, without a word of instruction, that the best toy is the one you dream up. Read it and watch the recycling get raided.
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Armed with nothing but a purple crayon, Harold draws himself a whole world to wander through whenever he pleases. It’s a quiet celebration of the fact that a child with a bit of imagination is never really bored, and it’s charmed children for decades. Keep the crayons handy afterwards.
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Boredom into adventure
Older children can take a proper story where boredom is the very thing that kicks off the adventure. A good page-turner is its own answer to a dull afternoon.
Milo is a boy so bored that nothing interests him, until a mysterious tollbooth appears in his room and carries him off to a land where words and numbers come alive. It’s a witty, clever adventure that gently teases the very idea of being bored in a world this interesting. A brilliant read-aloud with a lot going on under the fun.
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Tom fills his dull moments with doodles, schemes and daydreams, in a scribbly, hugely funny series that turns an ordinary bored kid’s life into brilliant fun. It’s catnip for a reluctant reader, and it quietly models turning a flat afternoon into something of your own. The first of many, if it lands.
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Doing something about it
An older child who says they are bored usually means something closer to restless. Each of these hands that feeling to a character who then does something fairly drastic with it.
Claudia is fed up with being taken for granted, so she plans properly and runs away with her brother to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bathing in the fountain and sleeping in a Renaissance bed. The pleasure of it is entirely in the logistics. Slow to start and worth staying with.
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Four children are handed a boat and a lake and left to it for a summer, and the book is simply what they make of the time. Very little happens by modern standards, which is precisely the appeal for a child who has run out of things to do. Long, and best begun aloud.
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Something to do together
A jar of ideas to make together for the next ‘nothing to do’ afternoon, so the answer is already waiting when the moaning starts. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Boredom isn’t a problem to be solved so much as a space to be left alone, the very place a child’s own ideas come from. You don’t have to fill it for them, and these books gently make that case.
So resist the urge to leap in with a screen, and let the dull moment sit long enough for something to grow in it. More often than not, a bored child left to their own devices becomes a busy one.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.