Boredom a Newly Evolving Problem

In Chapter 6 of Coining For Capital Kapur discusses how being "bored" is a relatively new issue.  Before the spread of wealth and general prosperity in the U.S., children were often destined to work from a young age.  This lack of free time and long list of tasks prevented a absence of tasks to conquer.  With new found wealth, and a fresh market for children, Americans began consuming at high rates.  More recently, as Kapur discusses, parents now feel as though they must outright combat boredom in their children (p. 129).  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/nyregion/teenager-tells-police-boredom-led-him-to-start-fire-that-injured-2-officers.html?_r=0.  As this article makes clear, bored children can be very dangerous.  Not only may they fall in with the wrong crowd, they might just set a mattress on fire.  Just as Kapur relates with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, children's minds are dangerous when left to their own devices, unstimulated by consumer goods.  This seems to hold true even for young children.  Recently there have been many reincarnations of videos alleging to make babies more intelligent.  Thus, to keep our children intelligent and at the forefront of their age group, not to mentions out of gangs, we must buy goods and force our infants to lay motionless in front of a television screen.  Perhaps if we can manage to keep kids busy enough they won't get into any trouble.