Somewhere in week two of the previous school holidays, our nine-year-old wandered downstairs, looking for something or anything to do and frowned over my shoulder at the laptop screen.

“I don’t really understand what you do, but it looks very boring.”

From a child, there is no harsher judgment. The joke was on her, of course, because (at that particular moment) I was actually procrastinating on X.

Working from home has its benefits, but the collapsing of boundaries between the personal and the professional is never more apparent than during school holidays. For working parents this interregnum tends to be a time of stress and extreme scheduling.

The answer, traditionally, is a packed itinerary of activities in far-flung corners of the city, where someone else can keep the kids busy climbing ropes, practising judo or learning archery. But increasingly, many of us are attempting to work while keeping kids entertained as we hop between meetings.

The result, inevitably, is that not only are we exposed as being boring, we are also vicariously boring our children.

A bored child feels like a parenting failure.

Isn’t our job to keep them stimulated, challenged or amused? The scale of this failure is only heightened by the fact that it is now almost impossible to avoid distraction or........

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