Your Teenager Is Bored and You're Out of Ideas

I watched my 12 year old son look around the room one night, and say he has “nothing to do.”

He said it standing in a house full of books, games, art supplies, siblings - and, mind you, many things to clean and tidy up. He said it with the same energy people use to announce that there’s nothing to eat while staring into a full fridge.

I wanted to say: Go build something. Read something. Learn something. Be bored - boredom is good for you.

What I said was: “Do you want to help me fold laundry?”

He did not want to help me fold laundry.

Here’s the thing about teenagers - we want them to explore. We want them to pick up a guitar, mess around with a camera, play chess, bake something delicious. (With a side benefit of us not having to be their constant source of entertainment 😉)

But the gap between wanting that and making it happen is enormous.

One-on-one lessons to learn any of these things really well, run $50-$200 a session. And that’s per kid.

Oh, and that’s before you factor in the driving - the scheduling, the coordinating with three other kids, and, of course, the sitting-in-the-car-waiting, that eats away at your entire day.

So what about YouTube?

You know what’s there? Everything. Including everything else. And in our homes, handing a teenager unrestricted access to YouTube so they can learn guitar is not an option. It’s a non-starter.

So we’re stuck in this gap. Our kids want to learn, create and find what they’re good at, and we want that for them too, but the options are either wildly expensive, logistically impossible, or come packaged with content we don’t want anywhere near our homes.

Enter Dabbl

A group of frum parents - some of them expert photographers and musicians themselves - were staring at the same problem. They had teenagers who, like them, wanted to learn real skills from real pros, and there was literally nowhere safe to send them online.

So they built it.

Dabbl is an online platform with dozens of video courses taught by well-known, incredibly talented, frum instructors - photography by Hudi Greenberger, magic by Shlomo Levinger, guitar by Ari Boiangiu, voice by Devorah Schwartz, plus courses in 3D printing, DJ, chess, basketball, hairstyling, sourdough, personal finance, and more coming constantly.

These courses are professionally filmed, taught by masters in their field, and up to par with major streaming and digital course platforms.

Your child picks what interests them, watches it at their own pace, and actually does it. There’s also an Android app so they can download courses and watch offline. (iOS coming soon.)

It’s screen time that turns into real skills. (The sourdough course alone has apparently produced some genuinely impressive bread situations.)

If you’re already frantically scrolling through afikomen gift ideas and dreading all the requests that will inevitably come piling in for stuff that will be forgotten by Lag B’Omer, a Dabbl subscription is $24.99 a month for your entire household. One gift, every kid is covered, and it actually gets used past the second day of Chol Hamoed.

You’ll feel like you won Pesach.

(Also, this isn’t only for teenagers. They have a sourdough course taught by Hudi Greenberger, and I have been looking for an excuse to learn how to make a proper starter for approximately two years. So if my kids think the subscription is their afikomen gift but I’m the one quietly watching the sourdough lessons at night… that’s between me and... well, I guess, now -you)

There are built-in content filters, one for tznius considerations, and a second that filters out all female instructors entirely. You set it once, and your kids can browse freely.

They also recently opened the entire platform for free to families in Eretz Yisrael. All the kids stuck in shelters during the war now have access to every course.

The messages from parents were the kind that make you cry. Kids learning magic tricks in mamadim… I mean, there’s just something about how creativity becomes a lifeline, not a luxury in times like these.

Look, nothing will solve the existential crisis of raising teenagers in a digital world. But when my kid says “I have nothing to do” and I can point him toward a photography course taught by someone whose work I really admire, on a platform I don’t have to worry about?

Yes. I’m in.

Check out Dabbl and let your kids pick their first course. Use the code DT10 for 10% off both the monthly and yearly plan.

They have a free sample lesson if you want to test the waters, and to be honest here, the magic course alone is worth it just for the Shabbos table entertainment value ;)