by Marisue Alsobrook

Introduction: Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.  The Boy Scouts are right on this one.  With a little thought and advance work, summertime can be the best memory for our families. Family vacations, lazy days, and home projects are links for togetherness.  Family fusses are part of it,  but you can survive. Think about it first and then just have fun. Key:  Safety First!  Even though play isn’t spelled “plan” - take some time to prepare for success, just leave some room for impulsive fun.

Summertime Tips

• Create a Snack Basket - Establish a “snack site” within child reach and you’re a step ahead of ravenous children. Include healthy options like fruit, raw veggies, string cheese, animal crackers, popcorn, raisins and dried cereal instead of sugar-filled cookies or greasy potato chips. Bundle all of the above into a large plastic food storage container, label it “Snacks” with a permanent marker, and put it on a low refrigerator shelf.
• Encourage independent lunch preparation - Prepare sandwich makings ahead of time, such as: PB&J, jar of mayo, floppy packs of lunch meat and cheese, cello pack of washed lettuce all stuffed into large open container labeled “Sandwich Makings.” You pull the box out, you make your sandwich, and you replace the box.

Art lessons, math, gymnastics and music compete for our children’s time.  Soccer, Little League, other team sports demand total family loyalty and the sacrifice of every dinner hour for a three-month season.  Each summer, there’s golf camp and computer camp and swimming lessons and Cub Scout Day Camp and Mom’s in the van for every single one.  Are your children too involved?  Trim activities where you can, over achieving leads to a lot of stressful people and the “jack of all trades” can also be a “master of none.”

Will this summer give your children time to be a kid?   We over-schedule our children from age 2 to early adolescence. Then they dive into the relative aimlessness of the peer groups at age 13 without the internal resources necessary to keep them out of mischief.  Why? Because they’ve experienced Parent-As-Social-Director and have never learned to amuse and engage themselves.  Enough already!

This year, consider giving your school-aged children the ultimate Status Kid gift: free time.  (Supervised if possible, though.  Latch-Key kids are prone to such danger in our world.) Still, they need:

• Time to dream
• Time to grow
• Time to stretch out on the hammock and read a novel
• Time to build elaborate fantasy worlds in the backyard sand pile
• Time to squabble with siblings
• Time to resolve issues without Mom’s intervention
• Time to learn: crafts, how to do their own laundry, to cook, to sew.  (Do people still sew?)
• Time to build model rockets - Remember those back yard years?
• Time to open a lemonade stand on the corner - supervised, be aware of “stranger danger!”
• Time to mow a few neighborhood lawns for money - or perform other tasks for a few extra bucks
• Time to hold a mega-Monopoly tournament and decide the ruler of the world. 
• Scrabble anyone?  Board games are not necessarily “boring.”

Let summer be the time when you’re all a little nuts - not the hectic kind of nuts, but the good kind of silly nut.  Have some fun and play with the kids; talk, dream, wish, set a few new routines. 

In carving out time for play, you give your children the most valuable skill of all: the ability to nourish and sustain themselves, and see a different side of Mom and Dad.  Getting them ready for life involves more than grades at school, but also “life at home.”  I’ve seen a lot of kids that just didn’t know how to be at home.  After 250 foster kids marched through our home, we saw quickly that they knew where the refrigerator was, the couch, the tv, the bathroom, and the car.  The mops, brooms, vaccuum cleaners and laundry room were foreign objects and almost scarey to them. 

They didn’t have a clue how to use free time and mostly spent it either aruging with other people, or planning mischief.  The more times we spent talking and playing games, the more human and real they became.  “Life” is more than moments in the hall at school, moments in detention, and moments at the counselor’s office.  We have to show our kids how to “be.” 

Got teens? Do it the other way, and keep them busy. Idleness is often not a safe thing to give teens.  Summer jobs may be hard to find for younger teens, but volunteer work gives young people of any age the invaluable gift of learning to contribute.

Let them help at the Food Bank, in local libraries, and summer day camps. Herd them, bleating and moaning, to your area’s Habitat for Humanity house and put a hammer in their hands. Hire them to paint the house, shampoo the carpets, detail the car.  Ignore their complaints.  Help them help you and others.

Give your teens the gift of usefulness and the joy of productive work. The experience of being a young adult taking a first few steps into an adult world is far, far more valuable than another summer lolling around the pool, gawking at swimsuit-clad peers. They’ll thank you for it, too, in 25 years or so!  Or not, still it’s the right thing to do.  I think the Brittany Spears of the world would be better off in service to others, and without so much money in their pockets and time on their hands.

Savor Summer’s Fleeting Sweetness

Summer is a special time for mothers, too. Snuggling with your youngsters, bringing late-night snacks–and a welcome reminder of home and safety–to first-time back-yard tent campers. Teaching a child to cook Grandmother’s Banana Pudding, and sharing stories of your own childhood as you stir.  Sound old-fashioned?  Well, maybe we could all use some of that!

Reading the whole of “Harriett the Spy” to a wide-eyed 8-year-old. Shopping for a 13-year-old daughter’s first “junior” bathing suit and not wincing at how womanly she suddenly looks. Supporting (and surviving) a 16-year-old’s first job search.

Summer is not just for kids! Reach for that sweetness, Mom. Make time for it, between working and shopping and following the ant trails and paying the power bills. It is the stuff that life is made of, after all!

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