'I'm bored!' This is the cry that can send shivers down the spine of the most resilient parent.

But after an emotional, exhausting year, and with the Christmas holidays stretching ahead of us with fewer visits to friends and family, it's reassuring to know that boredom can be good for our children.

Our intuition, increasingly backed up by new research, tells us that giving children time to be bored, to amuse themselves, to muddle along on their own, is a very good thing.

Not only does it give space and time for creativity and imagination, it also teaches our children important skills such as planning and managing their time, developing self-discipline and helping them to embrace and make the most of feeling bored.

Christmas seems the perfect moment to give boredom a go as there is plenty of time, endless opportunities to get creative and lots of reasons to let our children get out from under our feet and learn to amuse themselves.

It's a chance to ditch the guilt and teach them how to be bored, instead of finding distractions to avoid it at all costs. Perhaps we can even help them learn to associate it with positive feelings rather than as an empty void to be immediately filled with screens.

We often hear that creativity is nurtured by boredom – that many great ideas were born on long walks, while folding laundry or lying in the bath (an eminently sensible place for Archimedes to ponder water displacement).

So why is boredom so brilliant?

1. It gives creativity and imagination a chance to thrive

Overscheduled, over-organised and busy children with little time to just be are missing out on the chance to let their imaginations run.

Boredom helps our minds to wander, to come up with ideas, to make new associations and to creatively solve problems.

Unstructured time, when children dream up things to do without the interference of adults, is vital to healthy child development.

As Michael Patte, associate professor of education at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, says: 'Boredom is a vehicle for children to create their own happiness, enhance inventiveness and develop self-reliance.'

The feeling allows our children to discover interests and passions. Not only have countless writers, artists and scientists credited boredom for their ideas, many a child has also discovered a life-long love of insects, reading, kicking a ball, drawing or building during time left with their own imagination.

When the mind wonders and daydreams – and, more scientifically, when it is in a restful state – it allows the brain to explore and make new and different connections that create ideas and solve mysteries.

2. It's good for the brain

There is fascinating new research around all aspects of boredom and much of it supports the idea that it is good for the brain, giving it a much-needed rest.

Alice Walf, a neuroscientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, suggests that we may even be able to retrain our brains to enjoy it.

When the brain falls into a predictable, monotonous pattern, we feel bored, even depressed, and this may be because of decreased levels of dopamine, the feelgood chemical released when we are excited.

She suggests that we can retrain the brain to enjoy these less fun times. When we are young, our brains are particularly able and adept at adapting to new ways of thinking and behaving. 'Give boredom a try and see what your brain comes up with,' suggests Walf.

It's exciting to imagine that we can help our children develop effective strategies to retrain their brains to embrace boredom.

3. Boredom is a life skill worth learning

Our children need to learn to embrace boredom for when none of the activities on offer seem, on the face of it, stimulating or interesting. This takes self-discipline.

John Eastwood, head of the Boredom Lab at York University, Canada, explains that the sensation is not as simple as having nothing to do: 'The bored person desperately wants to do something, but they don't want to do anything that's possible.'

Perhaps it's the drudgery of writing a history paper, sitting through a sibling's music recital, helping to stack logs or rake leaves: there are endless things that appear 'boring'.

Equipping our children with the skills to help them embrace and navigate these times is extremely valuable. The Boredom Lab team points out that boredom in young people has been associated with higher levels of risk-taking, perhaps in search of that dopamine fix.

So helping them grow up with a healthy and constructive experience of dealing with it is a good thing.

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