As a parent I'm very interested in why you would label your childhood as "boring". I would feel bad if my kids would feel the same. What is the reason? Were your parents very protective? Did you stay inside most of the time? What would you consider "not boring"?
I found my childhood to be boring, bordering on depressing. It was literally for a lack of stimulation for the following reasons:
- Only child.
- Invalid mother, so no access to all that entails: no car, no ability to get to places to do stuff, and all limitations related to health concerns.
- Father worked all day.
- I lived in a small, dark apartment with no internet, no cable, and no nearby friends.
Of course a kid is gonna find ways to entertain himself; I wandered the neighborhood, watched broadcast TV, played with my toys, etc.
But the general tone of my childhood can be summed up in a typical weekend: since dad is at work and mom is disabled and sleeps all day, I build my day around the newspaper TV guide. Just boring crap on until I Love Lucy comes on at 4 PM. Fill the cracks in with bouts of random wandering around the neighborhood by myself, but no kids around to play with.
Things changed as I grew and got more agency, but my formatives years of like 0-10 were pretty much this. Not ideal; I therefore have pretty strong opinions about giving my kids structure and access to their interests.
Also an only child and I don’t think that makes things boring at all. I hate that narrative. I look at people with siblings and I am disgusted at the amount of fighting involved.
Kids fight with each other because they need attention. The best way, but this is hard, is to give them undivided attention for as long as they want it.
Then you have to figure out how to reward cooperative play and not reinforce either negatively or positively bad behavior.
Hmm I have the opposite reaction, as a parent with a very "not boring" childhood I hope to provide enough stability for my children's complaint to be that we're boring, while taking the good parts of my childhood and instilling a sense of independence and capability in them. Time will tell if this is successful.
I guess the pendulum swings back and forth. I had a stable but not boring childhood. I think the main positive source was the small Forrest I grew up next to, an endless source of entertainment and adventure.
My kids don’t have this, but our garden is pretty big. I hope they aren’t bored by it. I dream of moving to a place in or near a Forrest with a small lake preferably.
I grew up in a safe neighborhood with a ton of twisting bike trails that weave through the various villages, but, are "behind" them in natural landscape so you always felt like you were in another world.
As a kid, these trails were the source of so much happiness and joy. I could hop on my bike, and go explore. Miles and miles of trails. As I grew up, I would venture further and further on the trails.
There are a couple points where the trails exit the safe neighborhood area, and connect up to the more general biking trails ... those were always such fascinating boundaries for me as a child. I'll never forget the thrill of crossing over into that forbidden land on my little 1 speed bike.
I was probably 8.
I don't plan to have kids but if I did, I would really want to ensure that they had a source of mystery and adventure which was their own. A sense of independence and freedom to explore.
Making sure kids have a small amount of unstructured time to forge forward themselves through....whatever obstacles...can possibly set them up for some fortitude later.
Mine was only boring because I had a lot of interests but no real way of exploring them (even with the internet) and thus never really accomplished anything of note. I can’t really point to any real happy memories though none were exceptionally unhappy either.
