‘Bored’ Kids Are Making A Comeback. Some Parents Say It’s Changing Everything.

Summer is coming. Do you know where your children are?

Chances are you do because they haven’t left your sight. They are sitting at home, staring at a screen, scrolling through TikTok videos, texting friends, and gaming the hours away.

As researchers have documented at length, most especially in Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” screens have contributed to an anxiety epidemic, fractured attention spans, and increasing emotional fragility in American children.

The answer to this crisis is not merely to cut down on screen time, but to replace screen hours with tangible, immersive, unstructured time in the natural world.

Author Richard Louv coined the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe how less time in nature harms modern-day children’s health, development, and wellbeing. But it’s not enough to simply get kids outside. Children don’t need to spend another week at an organized wilderness camp or to enroll in an additional sport. This only takes children out of their digital box to put them into a more physical one.

What children most need this summer is, well, nothing.

Every day this summer, have your kids spend at least one hour outside. No structure. No agenda. No goal. Let them climb trees, make up games, roll in grass, and be bored.

Read the full Daily Wire op-ed here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bored-kids-are-making-a-comeback-some-parents-say-its-changing-everything