When Parenting is Boring

Parenting is often portrayed as magic or madness, with little variation from the script. This makes sense – the best stories are often at one end of the parenting extremes. We save the in between stories for quiet moments with friends, where we feel safe admitting that parenting is sometimes (often) tedious, repetitive and dull. We love our kids to the moon and back, but sometimes hanging out with them is mind-numbingly boring.

Parenting is boring. . This dream we’ve been preparing for all of our lives, this “calling” to parenthood, this biological imperative is surprisingly monotonous and routine. When I imagined first words, tentative steps, favorite books, making the goal, riding a bike, slobbery kisses, and giggles, I didn’t account for:

• “Watch this, mom!” x 100
• Thinking, “Any book, but that one!”
• Spotting while your toddler practices his new trick for the 458th time that week.
• Playing dolls/cars/Shoots and Ladders on a never-ending loop.
• Pretending to be surprised.
• Acting as safety patrolman.
• Monitoring never-ending bath time after playing for awhile.
• Cheering for that again.
• Going to the zoo/children’s museum/park for more than 30 minutes.
• Teaching kids how to do chores.
• Soccer practice sidelines.
• Driving to activities.
• Homework.
• Potty training.
• Listening to the story that never ends.

As I write this list, I find myself needing to emphasize again, I love my kids. Parenting brings me joy. But that’s the tricky thing about parenting. It is filled with moments of magic and madness and incomparable joy, but these are accompanied by many more moments of tedium and commonplace. If you’re bored parenting sometimes, if every moment doesn’t fill you with overwhelming joy, that’s normal. That’s parenting.

Jennifer Senior validates how normal these conflicting feelings are in her popular New York Times Essay (and book) All Joy and No Fun. “Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities.”

Parenting expectations have changed in the last few decades as well. Senior explains.”All parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. Today’s married mothers also have less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week); 71 percent say they crave more time for themselves (as do 57 percent of married fathers). Yet 85 percent of all parents still—still!—think they don’t spend enough time with their children.”

Parenting has amazing moments that stand out in my mind and overshadow the tedium. But in the midst of all of the talk of “treasuring the moment,” I think it’s healthy to allow your parenting experience to be multi-faceted.While some boredom is inevitable, there are ways to avoid letting it overwhelm our days or weigh you down with guilt. Here are a few ways I tackle the day to day parenting duldroms:

1. Unplug. I get bored when I am not focusing on any particular thing, like half listening while checking social media that I’m not really interested in. When I unplug from distractions, my children notice and we all have a better time.
2. Go All In. It turns out that playing Pet Shops and Barbies with mom is pretty darn fun. I don’t want to regret not playing with my kids later in life when they don’t want to hang with me. So, I commit to a certain amount of uninterrupted (to a reasonable degree) of play time. I don’t worry about other things to do, answer social phone calls, or half commit. When I do this, the kids really appreciate quality over quantity and I have fun, too, knowing there’s an end in sight.
3. Check Out. Once I’ve played 10 rounds of tag, pushed everyone on a swing, lifted them in a tree, and turned on the sprinkler, I don’t think it’s necessary to be fully present for every “Watch this, mom!” or “Just one more, time Mom!” It’s okay to be with my kids to watch for their safety without entertaining them for every second.
4. Prioritize You. My son often wants me to watch him play video games or watch a kid’s movie with him. I will usually strike a deal with him that I’ll sit with him and read a book, write a blog post, or do something on my own in the same space while he enjoys these activities. I want him to know that I have my own hobbies, talents, interests, and work. I would rather our quality time be spent doing over watching, but I’m all for some quantity together time.

The fact that boredom is even on my mind today is certainly strong evidence that I don’t have all of the answers here. But I don’t want to give into boredom or the guilt associated with admitting that parenting isn’t always dreamy. Just like most things worth doing in life, parenting is complicated – exciting, scary, heartbreaking, joyous, fun, and dull.