Things to Do with Kids (That Don’t Make You Want to Fake a Work Emergency)

Smith Jones
things to do with kids

My son once spent 45 minutes arranging his socks by colour on the bedroom floor and called it “art.” My daughter, around age five, decided the best use of a Sunday afternoon was to repeatedly jump off the third stair and announce the landing score out loud. She gave herself a 10 every time.

Neither of these things were on any list I’d ever read.

And yet — both rank higher in my memory than the overpriced farm visit where it rained the entire time and someone lost a welly in the mud.

I’m not saying structured activities are useless. I’m saying the gap between “things that work in theory” and “things that actually work with your specific chaotic children in your specific house on a Tuesday” is wider than most parenting content admits. So here’s my attempt at something more honest.

The Indoors Survival Guide (For When Leaving Feels Impossible)

Some days the logistics of “going somewhere” are genuinely beyond you. Packed bags, appropriate shoes on everyone, snacks, car seats, the thing you forgot and have to go back for. Sometimes you just need a list of things that work within a twenty-metre radius of your sofa.

The fort situation

Blanket forts are legitimately good and I will die on this hill. Not because they’re wholesome or developmentally enriching — just because they work. Something about being inside a self-constructed wobbly structure makes kids behave differently. They get quieter. More conversational. My kids have told me more interesting things inside blanket forts than at any dinner table in recent memory.

The setup: dining chairs pushed apart, every blanket in the house, a torch or fairy lights if you can be bothered. The maintenance cost: you have to actually get inside it with them, not just admire it from the doorway. The downside: taking it down causes a grief response disproportionate to what just happened. Build during morning. Brace for collapse around 4pm.

Cooking that isn’t performative

There’s a version of “cooking with kids” that exists purely for Instagram — the matching aprons, the clean kitchen, the child who carefully measures flour without spilling anything. That is not real life.

Real cooking with kids looks like: flour on the floor, someone eating raw dough despite being told not to, a mild argument about who gets to press the button on the mixer, and then — eventually — something edible that they are inexplicably proud of.

Banana bread is the easiest entry point. Pizza is good because everyone can customise their own and there’s no negotiating about toppings. Pasta from scratch works well for older kids who are past the phase of touching everything they’re not supposed to touch. The mess is not a side effect. It is the activity. Make your peace with it before you start.

The boredom box (I’m serious about this one)

Get a cardboard box. Fill it with: old magazines, coloured paper, washi tape, stickers, cotton balls, pasta shapes, broken crayons, birthday card scraps, bits of ribbon, dried beans. When someone says they’re bored, hand them the box. No brief. No instructions. No “why don’t you make a…” Just the box.

What comes out of it is usually baffling. My kid built a “voting booth for beetles” once. I have no idea where that came from. The point is that it requires nothing from you except the fifteen minutes it takes to assemble the box the first time. After that it basically runs itself.

Science experiments that actually land

The baking soda and vinegar thing is a cliché because it works. Kids react to it with the same energy every single time, including the time when they’re old enough to explain the chemical reaction and are still somehow excited. Beyond that: oobleck (cornstarch and water, can’t stress this enough — it behaves like a solid when you hit it and a liquid when you don’t, children find this personally offensive in a good way), dissolving skittles in warm water to watch the colour rings spread outward, and growing a bean in a damp paper towel in a zip-lock bag so you can watch the root emerge without digging anything up.

I should mention: oobleck ends up on things. Everything, actually. Accept this upfront.

Board games — but not all board games

Some board games are a trap. Anything where: the rules take longer than five minutes to explain, there are thirty-seven small pieces, or younger players can see they’re losing and have fifteen more minutes to sit with that knowledge — those end badly. Games that don’t end in someone dramatically leaving the table: Uno, Dobble, Jenga, and for slightly older kids, Codenames. Monopoly is a relationship stress test dressed as a board game. I’m including this as a warning, not a recommendation.

Getting Outside Without It Becoming a Whole Thing

The honest case for going nowhere in particular

Pick a direction. Drive for forty minutes. Get out of the car. Walk around. The absence of a plan is not laziness — it’s genuinely different from “going to the park” or “going to the farm.” Kids who think they’re on an actual expedition, rather than being taken somewhere, carry themselves differently. They look for things. They make observations. They ask better questions.

This works best when you’re in an unfamiliar place with no pre-loaded associations. A town you’ve driven through but never stopped in. A stretch of coast you always pass on the way somewhere else. The point is novelty without stakes.

Scavenger hunts for kids who “hate walking”

The problem with walks, from a child’s perspective, is that the destination is never interesting enough to justify the distance. The scavenger hunt solves this by making the walk itself the point. Write a list before you leave — something rough-textured, a seed, a bird feather, something smaller than your thumbnail, a shadow that looks like an animal, a smell you can’t identify. Give each kid their own bag and their own list.

Important: don’t make it a race unless your children are the type who handle losing cheerfully. Mine are not. Non-competitive version works better across the board — everyone finds their things, everyone wins, nobody cries in the car on the way back.

Growing one thing

Not a garden. Just one thing. A sunflower in a pot on the balcony. Cherry tomatoes on a windowsill. One strawberry plant. The part that sticks with kids isn’t the gardening — it’s that it’s theirs. They watered it. They watched the change happen. When a tomato turns red it’s a different category of exciting than buying tomatoes at a supermarket and I cannot fully explain why, but it is.

Buy the cheap seed packets. Some will fail. Let that happen without fixing it.

Chalk on the drive

Large chalk, big surface, no instructions. Let them cover the entire driveway. Trace outlines, draw maps, write messages for the postman. The impermanence is the feature — rain clears it and the slate resets. Good for kids who get anxious about making things look “right” because there is no right and also it’ll be gone by Tuesday.

The slow walk

This is the opposite of a purposeful walk. The rule is: the kid leads and you stop whenever they want to stop. No destination. No pace. No “come on, keep moving.”

It feels, for the first ten minutes, like an exercise in restraint. Then something shifts. You start actually seeing things — the specific sound of gravel versus tarmac, a crack in the pavement that’s become a small ecosystem, the fact that your kid has been silently categorising every dog they’ve ever met by size and has strong opinions about it. Kids live closer to the ground than we do. Following their curiosity for an hour is strange and quietly lovely.

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When Money Is Actually the Problem

I’m not going to pretend that cost doesn’t matter or that “the best things in life are free” in a breezy, unbothered way. Sometimes budgets are tight and that’s just the reality.

What I will say is that library cards are criminally underused. Ours has free story times, craft sessions, a decent DVD collection, and occasionally free tickets to local events. Community centres run holiday activity programmes that cost a fraction of private alternatives. Local parks are free. Beaches are free. Forests are free.

The activities that cost the most are not usually the ones that leave the strongest impressions. I know this sounds like something someone says to make frugality feel virtuous, but I mean it straightforwardly — ask adults about their strongest childhood memories and the premium-priced ones are rarely at the top.

Some zero-cost things worth trying: writing actual letters to relatives and posting them (kids are novelty-addicted; handwritten post is now exotic to them), building a living room cinema with a laptop and homemade popcorn, cloud identification (genuinely, there are free apps and kids compete at this with unexpected seriousness), and a masking-tape obstacle course through the house that you absolutely will trip over in the dark later.

Weekends That Feel Like Weekends

The risk with weekends, especially school holidays, is that they blur into each other. Same park, same snacks, same routine. After a while everything starts feeling flat.

The smallest amount of variation helps more than you’d expect. A different town within an hour’s drive that you’ve never explored. Bowling — which adults find mediocre but children find inexplicably thrilling, consistently, regardless of age. A farm or wildlife centre where interaction is possible rather than just observation. A local event — a market, a fair, a match — because the atmosphere of a crowd does something to kids that a private activity doesn’t replicate.

It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing something that feels distinct from yesterday.

The Thing I Actually Want to Say

The reason I wrote this is because most “things to do with kids” content is either too aspirational to be useful or too generic to mean anything. Neither helps when it’s a Wednesday afternoon, the weather’s turned, and you need something real.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: none of these activities work if you’re somewhere else while they’re happening. Kids are not easily fooled. They know the difference between someone who is present and someone who is technically in the room. The activity is not the point. It’s just the excuse to be in the same space, paying attention to the same thing, not somewhere else in your head.

That’s harder than it sounds on certain days. I’m not saying it isn’t. But it’s also the only thing that actually matters, and most lists don’t say it plainly enough.

Twenty focused minutes beats a two-hour trip where you spent half of it on your phone. This isn’t a guilt trip — it’s just the most useful piece of information I can pass on.

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