22/08/2026
I could absolutely use this with middle schoolers!!
Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks recently wrote an impassioned plea: “You need to be bored,” he said. Others have called boredom the most important skill of the 21st century.
How can boredom be a skill? And why is it so important? To see why it matters, we need to look at young kids who are still learning the art and skill of being bored without imploding.
Lisa Elaine Peters is a popular teacher and social media creator. She recently took to Instagram Reels with one of her favorite, underutilized classroom management tips.
In the video, Peters says she sees a lot of teacher colleagues who have trouble with their kids’ behavior when they’re between activities, whether it’s waiting for instructions or lining up in the hallway. Peters says it’s because being bored is not a skill a lot of kids have today.
“You may have taught them behavior in the hallway, but have you taught them behavior while you wait? …This is something a lot of teachers don’t explicitly teach,” she says.
She constantly reminds her kids—both her students and her own children—that it’s OK to be bored and that we don’t need constant stimulation all the time.
“Most kids don’t know how to be bored these days,” she says.
Her solution? Actually teach them how to do it, and make it fun:
“I teach them little ‘bored games.’”
She can’t have their rapt attention all the time. Sometimes she needs to step away from the lesson and talk to a colleague or handle an issue, and the kids need to wait patiently. This is when her most prized classroom management tip comes in handy.
“All I have to say is, ‘Play a bored game,’ and my kids will know what to do.”
Peters’ bored games are shockingly simple.
She calls one “the thumb game.”
It’s literally just teaching the kids to twiddle their thumbs. It sounds silly, but a lot of kids are not taught how to do this. So when they learn, it’s fun and novel to them.
She also demonstrates a little finger pinching challenge game where the goal is to pinch your thumb and index fingers together on each hand, through each other, without the other fingers touching. It requires dexterity and focus, both of which are excellent skills for little kids to practice.
Peters also teaches them belly breathing and breathing deep with their hands up over their head. Sometimes, she’ll have them do “thumb claps” while they deep breathe.
Both of these techniques calm the body and mind.
Other times, she’ll break out the “color game.” For this one, she’ll give the kids a color and quietly, in their mind, they’ll have to spot as many things in the room of that color as they can find.
“They’re not shouting them out,” she says. “It just keeps their eyes and brains busy.”
If Peters’ ‘bored games’ sound mind-numbingly obvious and simple, well, they kind of are. But not to your average 6-year-old in the year 2026.
Previous generations learned the art of being bored by necessity. There were only a few TV channels and likely no kids shows on outside of Saturday morning cartoons. Millennials and Gen Xers owned a handful of movies on VHS that we’d already seen a hundred times. Before that, the Boomers had even less to keep them occupied.
So, we had to come up with stuff on our own.
Gen Alpha kids simply haven’t had the practice. The world is a far more stimulating place with iPads, instant access to almost any TV show or movie on multiple different streaming platforms, and the ability to play nearly any song that has ever existed at a moment’s notice on Spotify.
