Have been thinking about this a lot recently, prompted by posts on here and things in the media. It's become very fashionable for people to talk about how important it is for children to be allowed to "be bored" sometimes.
I totally understand and support the principle of this: which is that overzealous scheduling and helicopter parenting is not great for many kids. I think there is a place for not having your entire life planned out from dawn to dusk and for learning to entertain yourself.
But in reality I think this "leave them to get bored" is often quite unworkable. Once kids get "bored" these days they invariably reach for screens. Now, obviously it's up to us as parents to manage this. But there's a limit to how much you can police this, short of removing all devices. It would be great if "being bored" always meant directing kids out to rough and tumble play in the hayfields or making dens in the living room or finger painting, but that usually isn't what it means. It either means screen time or it means getting into things they shouldn't. Stopping this happening means endless policing of what they do. So, forgive me but given the choice I'd rather my kid was doing an after-school club than playing four hours of Minecraft (sorry Minecraft) or watching TV or being bullied by me to be "creatively bored".
"Constructive" boredom as its preached is one of these lovely ideas (a bit like "free range" parenting) that's much much easier to achieve if you have a huge five-bedroom pile in the home counties than if you live in a cramped two bed flat (from which you also work). It's pretty unworkable for most parents and I'm starting to find it increasingly irritating when people parrot this as if it were a solution to all parenting dilemmas.