Bring Back Boredom: A Requiem For Black Gen X Summers

There used to be a thing called boredom. Not the kind you complain about with Wi-Fi and seven streaming platforms within reach. I’m talking about real boredom; staring-at-the-ceiling, watching-ants-on-the-sidewalk, “ain’t-nothing-on-but-soap-operas-after-The-Price-Is-Right” boredom. And as a Black Gen X dad who grew up in the era of Jheri curls, tube socks, and universal latchkey kid protocol (see: “Don’t you let nobody in this house.”), I say this without a hint of irony: boredom might have been the most important part of summer vacation.

It was in that boredom that we got creative. We built worlds with nothing but imagination, bike tires, and the occasional giant cardboard box that was a clubhouse, a breakdance pad, or an art canvas, respectively. We passed long hours playing Uno or freeze tag or making up ridiculous games with equally ridiculous names. Some days were filled with activity, but just as many were left to the elements of whatever came our way. And that was the magic of it. The freedom. The chaos. The possibility.

Fast forward to now, and it feels like summer, at least the kind that shaped us, is dead.

We didn’t kill it. Hyper-competitive parenting did.

We stopped seeing value in daydreams

Today’s kids have schedules tighter than a Silicon Valley CEO. Between travel sports, enrichment camps, accelerated reading lists, and STEM programs, we’ve programmed the summer to death. What was once a break has now become the offseason grind. A warm-weather bootcamp for future scholarship recipients, Google interns, and startup founders.

But in all that hustle, we’ve stolen something essential. Summer used to be about the absence of structure. Now it’s about maintaining control in a different font.

Look, I get it. As a Black parent (especially a single Black father) I’m acutely aware of what the world wants to deny my kids. So we push. We prepare. We polish them up and present them as exceptional, because we know they have to be. But damn if it isn’t exhausting. For them and for us.

My Glee-obsessed 13-year-old daughter is starting to come into her own artistic and dramatic potential. She’s in theater camp this summer, and I’m glad she has a place to explore her passion. But I’m also kind of sad. Because theater camp is scheduled. Structured. Supervised. She’ll grow as a performer, sure. But will she learn how to do nothing and be okay with it? Will she know how to entertain herself with a cardboard box and a Sharpie? Will she ever just roam?

Gen X summers were feral, but fulfilling

My summers were a beautiful blur of spontaneity and slight danger. From the public pool to the basketball courts to random treks to corner stores with no particular purpose, our summers were self-directed chaos. Even when we were enrolled in day camp, it was mostly a teenage-led survival exercise with dodgeballs and boxed lunches.

There were rules, sure. But there were also long stretches of unsupervised time. Time to be curious. Time to fail. Time to try things that might not go anywhere but still taught us something. We learned how to read people, how to handle conflict, and how to entertain ourselves and others. And we did it all without a single app.

What those summers gave us was adaptability. Resilience. The ability to walk into a room with strangers and figure out what game was being played and its random rules, and then figure out how to win. They gave us improvisational skills for life. They taught us how to make lemonade from warm tap water and two sugar packets.

Today’s kids? They’re brilliant. But some of them can’t hold a conversation without checking a screen. And it’s not their fault; it’s the culture we’ve built around them. A culture that values productivity over presence, structure over soul, and outcomes over experiences.

Doing too much is now a lifestyle

The pressure to be excellent all the time has trickled down from Wall Street to the jungle gym. And as Black dads, we often feel that pressure more acutely. We want our kids to succeed not just for themselves, but for the generations they represent. And in our fear of their marginalization, we push them toward perfection.

But what happens when we forget to teach them how to sit still? To just be?

You can’t push creativity on a schedule. You can’t over-prepare for discovery. You have to make room for it. You have to leave space in the summer for the kind of moments that don’t show up on a résumé but shape a life.

Like wandering around the neighborhood for no reason. Or figuring out how to turn a laundry basket into a roller-coaster on the stairs. Or learning how to read the vibes at the basketball court before deciding whether or not to shoot your shot (metaphorically or literally) and call “next”.

We owe the kids their space

I’m not anti-camp. I’m not against organized activity. But I am against the idea that kids should never be idle. That every second of every day must be accounted for, optimized, branded, and captured. I want my daughter to know that freedom isn’t just something we talk about on Juneteenth—it’s something you feel on a Tuesday in July with nothing to do but ride your bike and follow your thoughts wherever they lead.

So I’m trying to build in blank space. Days where there’s no itinerary. Where she gets to decide how the day unfolds, even if that means doing nothing at all. Because that, too, is a skill. One that too many of us are forgetting to pass down.

There’s still a world to protect them from

We’re raising kids in this world that moves too fast and expects too much. A world that commodifies every interest and gamifies every interaction. But if we want to raise humans, not just high-performing outputs of our parental anxiety, we have to give them time to be human.

Summers are supposed to be messy and weird and wonderfully unproductive. They’re supposed to be the seasons of origin stories, when kids figure out who they are outside the classroom, outside their parents’ gaze, outside the grind.

We figured it out because we were left to our own devices. Not the digital kind; the real ones. Our guts. Our instincts. Our imaginations.

We can’t make memories on command

My daughter may never know the feeling of getting on her bike and riding until the streetlights come on. But she can still have the kind of summer that isn’t about achievements. A summer that feels like hers, not something planned for her. A summer where her mind can wander and her soul can breathe.

So yes, let her go to theater camp. Let her find her voice. But let her be bored too. Let her be curious. Let her figure it out.

Because one day, when she’s older, I want her to smile at the memory of the summer where nothing much happened—but everything changed.

She’ll have the rest of her life to run the rat race. I just hope she gets one summer to ride a bike down a steep hill. 

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