SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER Where is the balance between making the most of their time off without overscheduling? BY J E N N I F E R A S H TO N RYA N
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’m sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse in Paso Robles, California, watching my kids play while on a group family vacation this past spring. Among five families traveling together are a dozen kids ages 2 to 10. Several of them have grouped up to navigate a zipline hanging over the lawn between two maple trees. To ride, kids climb a ladder leaning
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against a tree trunk, swing their legs over a few high branches, and grab the rope from another child. For everyone 5 and over, this isn’t a problem. My youngest, who is 4, wants to ride, and I make no effort to assist. From 100 yards away, I watch her make it up the ladder while an older child balances in the tree to give her a hand. She does the leg swing move on her own, reaches
for the rope, and glides down the line to resounding cheers from the friends she’s met only yesterday. “Son, remember those are your only pair of shoes,” a mom yells from the porch as her son hurls a sneaker into the air to knock a football from a tree branch. “You can back off him this weekend,” her husband says. “Let him be one of the tribe.” The husband recounts his own childhood, biking in rural Pennsylvania with his buddies after school. They’d travel 3 miles to the river with no directions beyond a time to return home for dinner. He remarks that in raising his own kids in Los Angeles, the need for supervision is constant. From my viewpoint on the farmhouse porch, all looks right with childhood— kids mixed in age navigate challenges, make their own rules, giggle, yell, cry, and recover with each other instead of with adults. We’re around, but we’re not required to play referee or even camp counselor. Yet back home, school’s out in a few weeks and you know what I do not have planned? Downtime and free play. My kids are doing dance camps, gymnastics camps, chess camps, and vacation Bible schools. The sign-ups started in March with a flurry of group texts to coordinate with friends, and I suddenly had all 10 weeks scheduled. When the instructor of my parenting class advised against summer overprogramming, I pulled out my iPhone calendar to review. Was I doing this wrong? Judging from the farmhouse scene and the camp-tuition hit to my bank balance, I might be. But that day in class when I heard the argument for boredom, what I really felt, to be honest, was mad. Two summers ago, I had no choice beyond under-programming because there was no programming. Everything had been canceled and parents went from raising our young children with a village to being the sole providers of everything. I do not want or need another summer of that, so I choose programming. Yet this
COURTESY JENNIFER ASHTON RYAN
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