Less is more

By Karen Luckhurst

Children taught at home enjoy boredom, says Karen Luckhurst

I've been having a crisis of confidence of late. Sam has been exhibiting some challenging behaviour and three-year-old Zena has taken to playing schools with the baby, who has very amusingly proved to be a spectacularly unco-operative pupil. And it was a difficult summer.

Sam would have finished his first year at school and, frequently over the holidays, I happened on one of his peers with a long list of accomplishments. Often I found myself wondering if Sam was the only five-year-old who couldn't ride a bike without stabilisers, swim without armbands, read and spell competently, shin up a climbing wall, or grasp the rudimentaries of the violin and Spanish. Then, just as friends with good listening skills were beginning to put me on answerphone, a lot of experts on childhood wrote to the Telegraph about the state of children's mental health.

Britain's young, it seems, are suffering from over stimulation brought on by the modern world. When they aren't plugged into their Game Boys or the television, they are being ferried from football clubs to French lessons with extra maths and kayaking thrown in at the weekend. What they lack, the experts said, was the time and space to become bored enough to use their imaginations.

Now, I know I am breaking ranks here - there is enough guilt heaped on parents these days - but this all makes me feel rather smug because if there's one thing we do embrace in our house, it's boredom.

I get a little frisson of sadistic pleasure when I turn off the television after breakfast, just prior to announcing that I will be busy for a while and should not to be bothered.

I should add here that, if anyone is planning to sandwich boredom lessons between violin practice and beginners Latin, they should take a course first in becoming pester proof. The television going off is usually a precursor to a list of strident demands from Sam, Zena and Matty, followed by some general hanging around. Eventually they tire of this and find something to do. This can be a session of slug torture or a shouting competition, but often I am gratified to find they have teamed up to build a house from blocks or set up the train track.

In fact, we do very little that is structured, and deliberately so. I don't want my children pressured at such a young age. That's why they are not in school. I want them to be able to learn to think for themselves and develop their imaginations. Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge and he should know; he wasn't named man of the last century for nothing. So now I feel much more confident in what I am doing.

Although, I suspect, the nail gnawing will return the next time I see a three-year-old riding by on two wheels, tennis racquet and violin poking out the top of his backpack.