Here is how to make children bored to death:
1. Confine them indoors. To children, nature is a magical place. It stimulates their imagination, their curiosity to learn and discover, their desire to play and create, as well as their sense of wonder. If you want to bore children, don’t allow them to have any contact with the natural world. Instead, keep them indoors as much as possible and this will do wonders to stunt their playful and creative spirit.
2. Don’t allow them to play. Children love laughing, having fun, playing for no goal other than the pleasure of play, and this fills their psyche with immense joy. By taking play away from children, they will soon stop finding contentment in life, which is a sure-fire way to becoming bored to death.
3. Force them to do things they hate doing. Preventing children from doing what they love doing is a good tactic to make them bored, but this combined with making them do what they don’t like doing has even better results. To achieve this, coerce children into doing things they don’t care at all about, such us placing them in a classroom for hours upon hours every day teaching them things they have no interest in learning.
4. Make them live by the clock. Always keep children busy with a strict daily schedule filled with tasks they have to carry out. This will make them think that time is never enough, which in turn will make it difficult for them to let go and enjoy the present moment. Hence, whenever there is no external force that compels them to do anything, they will always be stressed to find something to do, believing that relaxing not doing anything is a waste of time.
5. Condition them to intense stimuli. Make children used to watching TV and playing video games so as to habituate them to intense stimuli. As a result, everything else in their world will seem dull and boring.
6. Fill them with distractions. Don’t allow them moments of focused attention. Instead, keep them constantly distracted, by, for example, showing them movies that are fast pacing. In addition, be sure to frequently disturb them when they are focused on a particular task or activity. This will help shorten their attention span, and hence make them constantly thirsty for bigger doses of entertainment distraction so as to experience moments of excitement.
7. Crash their self-trust. Lastly yet perhaps most importantly, make children believe that they are not good enough as they are, and that they need to depend on others in order to live well and happy. This will make them feel inwardly empty and unimportant, which will in turn urge them to constantly seek to satisfy their emotional needs in outside sources.
In their very early years, children experience life to the fullest. However, due to the way they are brought up and the environmental conditions they live in, most of them slowly slowly find that their life is nothing but a mere drudgery, and, unable to find meaning and purpose, they naturally turn into bored individuals.
Unintentionally, parents and educators alike help make children bored to death from the time they are born, and then wonder why the youth is doing nothing else other than wasting its life sitting day in and day out in front of a screen.
Instead of blaming children, it’s time that we adults understand the psycho-social conditions that help manifest this kind of behavior, and provide children with all the tools and resources they need to develop into intelligent, conscious, creative human beings who have mastered the art of squeezing the goodness out of life.