Do children get their daily dose of boredom?

By Bharoti Pande For The Straits Times

HAVE you ever wondered why Archimedes had his eureka moment while relaxing in a bathtub? Or why a falling apple gave Newton a brainwave and not just a bump?

I believe it's because both men were at their creative best as they were in the throes of total inactivity, possibly even boredom. Yes, boredom has a value. And so with the summer holidays coming up, make sure you don't cram your children's days with only classes and activities. It's important to give them a dose of boredom too.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not the laid-back, indulgent type of mum. If anything, I fit the stereotype of a "Tiger Mum": I'm Indian-Singaporean, and my children were strictly disciplined. They learnt the value of hard work, and ended up in Ivy League schools where they had to work very hard for scholarships to make the tuition affordable.

They could have been the famous bogey-children Tom Friedman warned his daughters about: "Girls, finish your homework - people in China and India are starving for your jobs". But honestly, I was a far cry from Amy Chua's now (in)famous Tiger Mum: despite the strict discipline, I believed in boredom being an important part of a child's education.

Consequently I was surprised when I Googled the word "boredom" to find that all the links only showed ways to overcome. It was much like WebMD, an American corporation which provides health information services, handles a query on urinary tract infections or earache. This attitude to boredom pervades our society and drives parents to dole out what they believe is "responsible parenting". As a result, activities are programmed for each moment a child doesn't spend in school: tennis, piano, violin, tuition, pottery, art, taekwondo, swimming, singing - and if all else fails, a play date. The view seems to be that the more you organise, the better parent you are. So we have children who don't know how to entertain themselves and, more importantly, don't even know themselves, as they've never had the opportunity to be alone.

We seldom hear the plaintive cry "I'm bored!" coming from a child today. I believe this is a sad indicator of how many opportunities for growth and maturing have been lost. The usual response a parent would have had to Jack's "I'm bored" would have been "Go find something to do…". Jack would soon realise that boredom was his responsibility, something he had to handle or accept if he couldn't come up with a solution. This is how life shapes up anyway, so it's a useful skill to teach our children. I truly believe parents today are far more conscientious than those of my generation ever were. They take parenting very, very seriously. But while they have a lot of information available to them, they still miss out on the wisdom that can only come with experience.

In their quest to be good parents, they feel guilty about unstructured time instead of valuing it. Looking back, I'm truly glad that we didn't have smart phones and smart apps. Our children had to entertain themselves and soon accepted that life could be dull or exciting, depending on what you made of it.

Thanks to wireless hotspots and 24/7 connectivity, every corner is a potential workstation, or if not a workstation, most definitely an information kiosk. The fact that connectivity is available seems to suggest that it must be used. Children have been made to feel inadequate if they are not swinging to a constant mental march.

No one sits anymore with a blank look, eyes glazed over, with fingers drumming to a faint tune as the brain whirs at its own pace and down its own path.

Last week as I sat in an airport lounge I noticed I was the only one sipping something from a cup. I mean, just sipping, not doing anything else. Everyone around me was eating and texting, or drinking and using an entertaining app. I believe they weren't even aware of the taste of what they had on their plates. For me, even water has a taste.

I have vivid recollections of my childhood in Calcutta: standing on the balcony, watching others also just standing on their balconies; or watching the raindrops scuttle along telegraph wires till they coalesced and became too heavy and plopped down. This is what children today are missing out on: the luxury of letting their brain dance to its own tune at its own pace. Instead, as a result of "good" parenting, they get constant stimulation but lose out on a deep, personal growth that can only come with introspection and silence.

I wish young parents today were bold enough to schedule in hours of boredom for their children, and so give them the unstructured time they need to discover their own eureka moments. Children need periods of mental blankness for personal growth, just as they need sheets of blank paper for creative expression.

This is when they can delve into themselves, learn who they are, what they want and, most importantly, grow comfortable with themselves, warts and all.

How are they going to get this enrichment in their hectically organised world? Will parents only recognise that this has a value if it is available via a free app?

stopinion@sph.com.sg

The writer teaches Business Communication at Singapore Management University. She has two children, now adults, whose childhoods were enriched with periods of boredom.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Idolising failure in hope of success

The Straits Times

Idolising failure in hope of success

By Denise Chong

Hope is the thing with drills and hammers.

I try not to get excited when I see drilling and hammering going on for weeks as retail spaces in my neighbourhood get renovated for new eateries and shops.

Shiny new furniture sitting inside, shiny proud faces of owners standing outside.

I try not to care because I have seen so many shops there close down within months of opening. And the whole renovation cycle starts again.

Hope is the thing with feathers, wrote poet Emily Dickinson. Hope is probably what helps some would-be entrepreneurs fly the coop, to escape from a salaried life into the tough one of setting up their own businesses, even as the risk of failure perches nearby like an ominous raven.

I wonder if quite a number of people who hammer away at setting up their own businesses are mentally cushioned by fail-fuelled pep talks that go along the lines of: "Fail fast! Fail early! Fail cheap!" That commonly heard advice for entrepreneurs asserting that businessmen shouldn't be too fussed about messing up because it is better to find out quickly what's not working and move on before it costs them too much.

All that talk about wearing your failures as battle scars and badges of honour. Does fetishising failure help or hinder us?

Small-business failure rates vary according to where the statistics come from, but they do yo-yo on the grimmer side. Here is a sampling:

From a statement from the Ministry of Trade and Industry in reply to a parliamentary question a couple of years ago on business failure rates among small and medium-sized enterprises: "What we know, for instance, is that in the United States, for 10 new businesses formed, about eight to nine businesses would cease operations in the same year. Our comparable numbers are between seven and eight..."

The BBC reports that more than 80 per cent of start-up businesses fail within the first five years.

Talk about running businesses on a wing and a prayer.

As I peer into another space in the neighbourhood that is being renovated for a new eatery, I spot a vintage chalkboard with the name of a cafe scrawled on it that does not match the one on the door. I find wonderful reviews of that old coffee shop on the Internet but also read posts about it closing down for good. A day later, the old cafe name is wiped away from the board.

Another one bites the (chalk) dust.

But remaking the image of failure into a more cuddly concept continues apace. And embracing failure is not just for business owners. The idea of using failure to unleash creativity and build character could prove energising to the rest of us.

The British media reported that one school there held a "failure week" to help nurture resilience. Another conducted a maths test in which (without the schoolchildren's knowledge) it was actually impossible to achieve 100 per cent, "to prevent students becoming obsessed with perfection".

In Dublin, at Trinity College's Science Gallery, a recent exhibition entitled "Fail better" had the goal of opening up a public conversation about failure. "Rather than simply celebrating failure, which can come at great human, environmental and economic cost, we want to open up a debate on the role of failure in stimulating creativity: in learning, in science, engineering and design."

So does making failure more huggable help us? Optimistically, yes.

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." As a Slate report says, these "six disembodied imperatives" from the Samuel Beckett prose piece Worstward Ho "have in their strange afterlife as a motivational meme come to much greater prominence than the text itself. The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a start-up culture…"

Here, remaking the image of failure flies into a territory where it appears nearly uncool to even try to dampen the risk of failing.

There is an established Silicon Valley conference called FailCon for entrepreneurial types to study their own and other people's failures, and to hear about how failing actually makes them more likely to succeed in the future. A version of the conference was held in Singapore too.

So does fetishising failure in the context of start-ups hurt us? Yes and no.

The New Yorker notes that "because we don't know how to identify good companies in advance, investors end up funding lots of them in the hope that a few will hit it big… The economy has come to rely on this Darwinian process to drive innovation".

Mr Brian Wu, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan, told the magazine: "Overconfidence means that many more companies start up than will ever succeed. That's unfortunate for individual companies. The paradox is that it's really beneficial for society."

Hope is the thing with a fish hook stuck through it.

Baiting the next would-be entrepreneur.

denise@sph.com.sg