The Lost Art of Boredom: How Screen Time is Killing Our Kids’ Creativity
Here’s a story about throwing out TVs. Two of them, actually, separated by 30 years and a whole lot of punched drywall.
The first TV vanished when I was seven. My father, a neurologist who’d recently discovered Orthodox Judaism, decided one day that the flickering box in our living room was doing more harm than good. Just like that—poof—it was gone. No committee meetings, no family vote. Just a sticky note (God, that sticky note still haunts my dreams) with some handwritten happy crappy about the great outdoors, natural curiosity, and a life worth living.
(The Two Kinds of Artistic Doubt.)
I lost my mind, naturally. Did what any reasonable kid would do: threw myself on the floor, screamed until my throat was raw, and put my fist through a wall. Several walls, if we’re being honest. The holes stayed there for years, little pockmarks of rebellion.
But here’s the thing about kids—they adapt. They have to. Nature doesn’t give them much choice in the matter. So I started taking my bike to the public library, sneaking Stephen King novels with their covers torn off, hiding in corners where the librarians couldn’t catch me reading about possessed cars and undead pets. Those books became my TV, my movies, my video games all rolled into one.
Fast forward 30 years. I’m standing in my own living room, staring at a different TV, watching my three kids zombie-walking to the couch each morning just to stare at its blank screen. The same screen that was slowly eating away at their imagination, their creativity, their ability to think in more than 10-second TikTok intervals. Ten seconds? Who am I fooling?
So I did what any reasonable parent would do—I channeled my old man. Out went the TV, in came an elaborate IKEA art station that would make Bob Ross weep with joy. And wouldn’t you know it? History has a sick sense of humor. My kids? They punched holes in the exact same spots I had all those years ago. Different house, same story.
But then something magical happened. Just like I had decades before, they adapted. Started painting. Reading. Writing their own stories. Found their way to boredom’s secret garden, where creativity blooms in the spaces between digital distractions.
This journey—from TV-less kid to TV-banishing parent—shaped more than just my entertainment habits. It shaped my storytelling. My debut novel, Georgie Summers and the Scribes of Scatterplot, just went to press with 20,000 hardcover copies. That’s not a typo, friends. Twenty thousand books, after four years of writing, two years of editing, and another year to find an agent.
The story follows young Georgie into a hidden realm where Scribes record humanity’s memories. Without these Scribes, people would forget everything—lose their minds completely. Sound familiar? We’re already halfway there, watching our kids lose their capacity for deep thought one “screen time” minute at a time.
You want to know what scares me more than any horror novel I ever snuck past those librarians? We’re raising a generation of kids who’ve never known true boredom. Never felt that maddening itch of an empty afternoon that can only be scratched by creating something new. Instead, we’re serving them digital candy every time they whimper, then wondering why they can’t stomach a full meal of imagination.
In my book, the villain—a terrifying fellow with bugs crawling out of his neck—wants to destroy all memories. But aren’t we already doing that? Every time we cave and hand over the iPad, every time we choose peace over persistence, we’re erasing our kids’ ability to create their own entertainment, their own stories, their own memories.
We’re not just parents anymore; we’re memory keepers. Every time we say no to the easy fix of screen time, we’re preserving something precious: our children’s capacity for wonder, for creativity, for deep thought. It’s harder than handing them a phone. It means weathering tantrums, patching holes in walls, setting up art stations that might go unused for weeks.
But trust me—as someone who’s lived both sides of this story—it’s worth it. Because somewhere between the thrown remotes and the torn book covers, between the punched walls and the painted masterpieces, our kids might just find what I found: their own stories, waiting to be told.
Check out Isaac Rudansky’s Georgie Summers & the Scribes of Scatterplot here:
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