With only days (DAYS!) left until my son’s eight-week summer vacation draws to a close, I’m left with a nagging question:

How is it possible that parents once survived three-month summer breaks without going absolutely insane?

The only answer I can come up with is they did it by neglecting their children.

I’m talking neglect by today’s standards, of course. In the 1980s, it was perfectly acceptable for 12-year-olds to run wild in the streets. As we headed into summer, I said I was none the worse for wear because of it. Two months later, I have to wonder if the same can be said of my parents.

Sometime between when I was a 12-year-old and when I became the parent of a 12-year-old, societal norms changed. For more than a decade, I never really considered that things like daycare, summer camp, sports, enrichment classes and other supervised activities were optional. If anything, I felt guilty that I didn’t have time to enroll my children in more programs.

If you had asked me a few months ago, I might have argued that kids need lots of structured activities to give them a leg-up in life. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that these “extras” might benefit parents even more than their children. After all, kids kept entertained and engaged by day tend to be exhausted by bedtime.

Last year, ferrying the kids from one place to another threw my schedule into chaos and no one was happier than me when summer arrived. I had no idea my bliss would be as short-lived as my son’s interest in using his vacation to beef up his math skills.

Despite putting up some tough resistance, my son did actually pick up some math concepts this summer. He took a course in graphic novels. He read more books in a few weeks than I’ve read all year and taught himself to use a video editing program that allows him to make movies of all his computer game accomplishments.

However, I’m the one who got the real education this summer. I learned that it’s easy enough to “program” your kid, but it takes a lot more to deprogram them than saying, “You have free time. Go have some fun!”

Looking at it in perspective, my son did a fine job of entertaining himself — most of the time. It’s the rest of the time that was a problem. A bored 12-year-old can be a scary thing and for the first time in his life, my son’s boredom wasn’t limited to an hour before bedtime or a few hours on the weekend. He had long stretches of excruciating boredom and he made sure that everyone felt his pain.

Now that school’s starting, we’re swinging back to the other extreme and I’m so filled with relief that it’s going to be hard for me to resist filling up my son’s “free time” with new activities. In between studying math, science and social studies, I’m going to make sure that kid has plenty of time to learn how to entertain himself.

If this summer taught me anything, it’s that the last thing I want is to go into next summer with a bored teenager on my hands.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 5:43 am and is filed under Family Tree, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.