In my master's thesis, I researched the attitude of children and adolescents towards boredom. I was interested in how often children and adolescents experience it, how pleasant it is to them, and how they describe it. I checked their opinion on the usefulness of boredom and collected their examples of creative ideas that emerged to them during boredom. I wanted to check the differences in the understanding and experience of boredom of children and adolescents in different developmental stages, the association between boredom and the use of digital technology, and to check the view of parents on the experience of boredom in their children. I included 30 children and adolescents in the sample of the master's thesis, namely ten participants in each of the three developmental periods: middle childhood, late childhood and adolescence; and their parents. I conducted a semi-structured interview with the children and adolescents, and the parents completed a questionnaire that I prepared for this purpose. I analysed the responses of open-type children and adolescents according to a well-founded theory, and the closed-type responses with nonparametric statistical tests. The results showed that children and adolescents in general find boredom a slightly uncomfortable emotion that they experience about once a week and find it beneficial. Boredom is most often associated with lack of activity and lack of social contacts. In addition, the causes of boredom are also disabling activities due to external factors, laziness and inability to recognize one's own desires. Children and adolescents use either active or passive strategies to deal with boredom. Both the use of strategies and the understanding of boredom change over the ages. Children and adolescents, as well as parents, gave various examples of creativity during the time of experiencing boredom. Participants often use digital devices to deal with boredom, or at least want to. The research is the first in Slovenia to provide insight into how children and adolescents understand boredom and how their view changes during development.
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