I heard the author of a new book titled Thrilled to Death in an interview on the radio on the way to work this morning. He said that if children are not bored when they grow up, they never have the opportunity to develop the imaginative and creative parts of their brains. The name of the author is Archibald D. Hart and the subtitle of the book is How the Endless Pursuit of Pleasure is Leaving Us Numb. What he said rang true to me. Some of it was pretty scary. He said that children today are over-stimulated. They have PlayStations, XBoxes, Televisions, the Internet, cell phones, and a million other things that stimulate them all the time. With overuse of the brain’s pleasure circuits a condition called anhedonia can occur. A symptom of this is profound boredom, not bred of having enough to stimulate, rather from having too many things that stimulate. Boredom bred of too little stimulation helps children develop the creative and imaginative parts of the brain. Boredom bred of too much stimulation can lead to anhedonia which can be a significant contributing factor in depression.
Dr. Hart believes that, due to the ubiquity of overstimulation in the youth of today, there will soon be an epidemic of drug addiction and other addictive behavior. People will turn to anything that works to help them overcome the boredom and lack of stimulation when the pleasure centers of the brain shut down from overuse. Quite a few thoughts entered my head while I listened to the interview. First, I was thankful that we have never had a television and that we read and did a lot of art with the kids. Second, I realized that I need to exercise a little more control in our household with respect to the amount of time the kids spend on the computer.
A big part of the problem appears to be that parents are so busy, they put their children in front of a television or a computer game so they (the parent) can do something else. Either that, or they send their children to day-care or after school-care that does the exact same thing. One of the best parts of our experience raising Kelly and Christian has been doing things in the evening with them after work. Right now, all we do every night is read our book on multiple worldviews. I think it is time we got back to our art program. We sit together, listen to classical music, and draw. It is not so much that we are becoming great artists, but, for every minute we spend drawing, we will not be on the computer and we will be talking to each other.