Kerzman: Yes, it's OK for your kids to be bored during the summer

A casual observer seeing my kids flopped on the couch, idly thumbing through YouTube in their jammies at 1 p.m., might make that gesture where you make little circles with your hand, open, palm facing down, and say something needs to be done about all this.

But I don’t.

When I look at my loafing kids, bored out of their skulls and unencumbered by deadlines and external expectations, I get a vague glimpse of a life before the demands of busy jobs, a house to maintain and improve, and a whole Instagram worth of appearances to keep up (“rise and grind fam!”).

Sure, it irks me a little. I feel a bit guilty that we didn’t get them more involved in stuff (ironically, because we were too busy to make our kids busy). And, frankly, I’m jealous. Jeez, a week or two off and I could finally get past the tutorials in “Crusader Kings 2".

But, see, I was like them once. I whiled away hours of lush summer days with lame non-prime time TV, stuff like bowling tournaments or talk shows with wave after wave of b-list celebrities. I’d drag out some old toys, play with them for a few minutes, think they’re lame, put them away, then pull them out again because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. I’d re-read my X-Men comic books three, four, five times. I’d make little towns and forts out of sticks and mud.

Looking back, though, I realize that time — when I daydreamed whole afternoons away, wandering through the long windbreak of tall pines behind our house, imagining myself with my dwarf and wizard companions on a fraught-filled journey to slay a horrible dragon — was a vital component of the curious, introspective person (and model employee) you see before you today.

As we grow older, we invariably begin to do the math and realize just how little time we have. We value efficiency, hustle and maximalism, ideas that all boil down to cramming more stuff into an ever-shrinking pocket of space and time.

Having kids, ironically, seems to pour gasoline on that dumpster fire. I saw a Reddit post around Father’s Day asking dads what their ideal gift would be. It wasn’t a treadmill or a bigger, better grill. Almost every dad answered that they simply wanted more time. Time with their families. Time away from their families. Time to engage in their favorite non-monetizable activities, time to walk or exercise, or time to just do nothing at all.

Our kids will have the rest of their lives to hustle. But right now? It can wait.

Their work ethic is fine. Their “skills mindset” and “grit sensibility” or whatever, those are fine, too. (They could probably get more exercise, though.)

What they might never have again is time to do stuff like make an Iron Man suit out of spare cardboard and a glue gun, like my son did last week. Or 3-D print some weird skull thing, like my daughter did the other day. They won’t have any idea of what it means to simply enjoy life, to stretch their imaginations, or to think of human endeavor outside of deadlines, scarcity and responsibility, something only the most privileged among us can afford. They’ll burn out in their 30s, wondering why they busted their butts getting to a point where the only objective is busting your butt.

There is one thing I’ve tried to make my kids do this summer. I’ve tried to get them to think about what this time is for them, that it’s not always like this. That someday, they will have to pick up the responsibilities of the world when they need to fend for themselves and their own families.

But when they do, I hope they understand what it is they’re working for.