Summer break may break me

By Kent McDill

On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, dinnertime rolled around and I did not know where three of my four teenage children were, exactly.

I am willing to admit I am afraid that is how summer break is going to be this year.

Summer break is a time created by someone who thought children needed an extended time off from school to enjoy the best weather of the year. Whoever created summer break was not a parent.

Listen, we all love our children, and want to be with them as they grow up. But having them in school for six hours a day, five days a week gives stay-at-home parents a chance to catch up on all the activities that have to be dealt with on a daily basis, like laundry and grocery shopping and home repair and landscaping and occasionally breathing.

When summer break rolls around, all of those daily activities have to be shoehorned into your kids’ daily schedule of sleeping and eating and wanting to go places.

As a child, summer break for me was always about exploration, but I grew up in the ’60s, and exploration was a LOT safer then. Nowadays, because of the invention of the white van with painted windows, every childhood activity has to be supervised, and supervision takes time, not to mention attendance.

I never attended a summer camp growing up, and never went to summer school. My summers were spent playing baseball and basketball, skinning knees, swimming and exploring new territories (crossing one new big street a year without permission). My parents sent me out in the morning, I checked in for lunch, went out again and got home for dinner.

Today, children have to be watched everywhere, all the time. There is no “break” from supervision in “summer break.”

For parents with infants not yet in school, summer break is just an extension of the rest of the year, with the hope that more of the time is spent outdoors. But for most people with school-age children, summer break is defined by a few variables — vacation plans, summer school needs and camp schedules.

Despite your best plans, however, there is still a lot of free time for the kids. Those daytime activities only fill up half the day. Any good parent wants his child to spend the summer outdoors rather than inside playing video games or watching Phineas and Ferb, but when they are outdoors, you have to be outdoors, too. It’s hard to do laundry from the backyard, unless your community encourages outdoor appliances.

If you have more than one child trying to enjoy summer vacation, you often need to be in two places at once. Or worse, you have transport one somewhere (play date, camp) and you have to pull the other out of whatever he or she is doing and probably enjoying, and that child will not be happy. Kids just DON’T UNDERSTAND!

My boys, Dan and Kyle, both did summer sports camp for years, and it was great. They were outdoors, playing sports, hanging with friends, and out from under my feet for six hours a day, five days a week. It was like school, except that instead of being educated in reading and writing and arithmetic, they got an education in how to play poker and blackjack (rainy day activities, apparently).

But daytime activities in the summer only fill up half the day. When they got home, there was still a lot of daylight to burn, and they were ready to go out and about. With four of them, that’s a lot of paying attention.

Summer break is when parents really have to team up. Neighborhood relationships become important. You have to know Susie will be safe at her friend’s house while you try to figure out what to do with Billy and his friends.

Eventually, kids grow up and become teenagers, which brings us back to my situation. After the first week of June, my children will be 18, 16, 16 and 13. They will want to wander beyond previously known boundaries. They will want to be gone all day. And I can’t use the “I can’t drive you” excuse because their friends will be driving, and they will have transportation.

On that Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, Dan was at a Lake Michigan beach, Lindsey was purportedly at the neighborhood pool all day, and Haley, who is off to college in the fall, was just out.

My wife, Janice, and I are lucky. The kids have been well-behaved, and have not yet come home in a vehicle with flashing red lights on top. They have been afforded certain freedoms, and their boundaries have stretched.

But this summer break, those boundaries will be tested. They will not be satisfied with hanging out on the trampoline, or riding bikes up and down the block. They will want to be “out.”

And they will want $20 every time they leave.

Ÿ Kent McDill is a freelance writer. He and his wife, Janice, have four children, Haley, Dan, Lindsey and Kyle.