Judah Racham

Programme Leader for Family Work - Judah is a BACP registered counsellor, and Parent-training Mentor, who joined Place2Be in 2021. He has over 7 years experience delivering counselling and therapeutic services for adults and children. Judah has been supporting parents and carers, delivering parent training and supervising parenting practitioners within local authorities and the NHS for over 17 years.

When I was a child, I remember times when I felt bored. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that those moments would usually result in me finding a way to entertain myself. I recall using my imagination and creativity to create my own games as this was a long time before the days of the Xbox and PlayStation.

I can still remember how I would turn my house into an imaginary world where a stream of lava located on my stairs was something that I tried not to fall into, and the goal was to reach an imaginary treasure that was hidden in a cave located in my bedroom. I know it sounds like I had watched too many Indiana Jones movies, but this is just one example of the many ways I let my mind wander, from a place of ‘being bored’.

Fast forward now to me and my children, and the first thing I recognise is that there are fewer moments where I’m hearing my children say they are bored than when I was their age. I know there are probably good reasons for this; one of those being that we are in an age of technology, where entertainment is provided through the TV, tablets, phones and a variety of consoles. 

Recently, my family decided to have a ‘no screen weekend’ where we all agreed not to use our devices for entertainment, and this included the TV. Everyone agreed to stick to it even through gritted teeth. I have to admit that I was secretly wondering how I would cope without my devices for a couple of days. But what I noticed quite quickly was how, by creating some space for ‘boredom’, my children and I started to gravitate towards activities that we don’t usually do.

Things like playing cards, board games and even engaging in jokes and conversations together, which I must say felt good. My wife even took out a 1000-piece puzzle (which I don’t know how she is able to do) and I started to read books and magazines that had been gathering dust in piles for months.

This experience made me reflect on how, as a parent, I can sometimes feel an invisible pressure to keep children constantly entertained and I secretly dread hearing them say “I’m bored”. 

When children have nothing to do, their minds start working in ways that structured activities simply don’t allow. This is what I witnessed first-hand with my children, and boredom can become the blank canvas that sparks a world of creativity, problem-solving, innovation, and original thinking. In fact, I bet that some of the most creative breakthroughs – even for us adults – have come from moments of idleness.

I've started to acknowledge that by allowing my children to experience boredom, I am giving them the space to imagine, reflect, and become their own best source of entertainment and inspiration. So as the summer holidays loom, I'm already thinking of ways to encourage the space in the diary for my boys to become bored. When it happens, I will respond with a smile and say, “I wonder what you’ll come up with.”

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