We often hear how boring it is in Wendover, especially for teenagers.
We try to keep a straight face, we try to be polite but sometimes we lose patience.
We raised three kids here and are finishing raising a fourth and yes we have heard from our darlings’ own lips that there is nothing to do here.
We heard it before and we said it ourselves.
We grew up in Boise, Idaho and apart from everything to do there back in the 1970’s there was nothing to do.
We had an epiphany about 20 years ago when we visited our in-laws in Paris. One fine spring morning we woke up and saw our two nephews 15 and 13 laying on the floor watching cartoons and moaning about how bored they were in French.
Logically there is absolutely no possible way anyone can be bored in Paris.
It’s Paris!!!
24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, one is literally less than five minutes away from something exciting going on.
Yet there they were with Thunder Cats dubbed in French on the television complaining they had nothing to do and nowhere to go on one of the most beautiful mornings in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
We apologized to Boise then and there.
It wasn’t the little City of Trees that was tedious, it was ourselves.
Perhaps there is something in the teenage brain that seething mass of matter, chemicals and hormones that prevents the adolescent from enjoying being young and alive.
Maybe it is because being a young adult is so frightening, middle age is such a downer and old age is down right depressing that having too good of a time as a teenager would simply be unfair. Perhaps it is a psychological survival mechanism.
What ever the reason only a teenager can feel bored in a riot.
Does Paris have more things to do than Boise?
Yes.
Does Boise have more things than Wendover
Yes.
But one can do only so many things at once.
And having raised three kids and finishing raising a fourth we know that there is plenty here to keep a kid busy.
We are still driving our last around from activity to activity and he goes out with his friends.
Does he still get bored?
Duh!!
He is supposed to.
That does not mean he is a bad kid. It means he is a kid.
It also does not mean feeling bored leads directly to doing drugs or committing crime.
There is simply no study scientific or otherwise that found a correlation between ennui and felony.
It does not exist. So please stop telling us the kids get in trouble because they had nothing better to do.
Good kids get bored.
Bad kids get bored.
It is a democratic as acne and as common for teenagers.
And it is easy to fix.
In fact it fixes itself.
Give or take five years teenagers stop feeling bored.
But between the ages of 12 and 17 there is literally nothing short of imminent danger that will shake the boredom off a teenager.
It simply cannot be done.
But here is the marvelous thing. Being bored has absolutely nothing to do with how a teenager is going to turn out.
Our nephews became a doctor and a banker respectively.
Our kids turned out nicely themselves.
And we personally know dozens if not 100 of kids who grew up in boring old Wendover that are successful.
And yes they too were bored now and again.