A few days ago, my family went camping with some family friends. They have two small children. Now, these children are never bored. Their mother sees to that. If there is ever a moment in the day that isn't action-packed, she will tell them, "Go play (insert game here)", or, "Now we're going to watch a movie." I find this kind of sad. You see, these children will never have to fight boredom, which means that their imaginations will never truly run free.
A friend of mine and I lived at the very end of the longest bus route in our school district. Since our bus ride was an hour and a half long, and since first-graders have short attention spans, we got bored all the time. That is, until one day, we thought, "Being bored sucks. Let's use our imaginations to find a way to not be bored." So we made a game called "Space Adventures". Essentially, we pretended that we were on a spaceship, and I would describe to Jory what I was doing. He then told me how he reacted to my actions, and I responded. We had all kinds of crazy adventures, and so it came to pass that I was introduced to RPing at a very early age. It was so much fun, we played Space Adventures for years. In fact, even when we were way too old to be playing spaceman, we still did it. And it all dates back to the boredom of the bus in first grade.
Children need to experience boredom. If a kid just watches a video whenever there isn't anything exciting to do, then that kid won't ever think of fun ways to play on their own. I know kids are perfectly capable of amusing themselves on their own. When the school bus runs into a snowdrift and is stuck for 5 hours, your children will need to know how to fight boredom on their own. And they will never do that if their parents never give them the chance. Yes, boredom sucks. But the resulting thoughts it brings can last a lifetime.
Yes, my bus really did run into the snow. You know what we did? We played hide-and-seek. Hide-and-seek on a school bus isn't that much fun, but it took our minds off of the boredom. And the numbing cold.