Half insanity and half joy. When do they go back again?
Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash
"Mom, look! Mom, Mom!” my second grader yelled as he threw open the door to my office right smack in the middle of a virtual meeting I was leading from home. Mid-thought, I awkwardly laughed, excused myself, and put my call on mute. I ripped my eyes from the screen and gave him a stern look. He knew what that look meant and hushed, but his little body still jumped and squirmed excitedly, wanting me to know he had just ridden with no hands on his bike for the first time.
“That’s great, baby!” I responded. “But I’ll have to see it after my call, ok? I need to focus on my meeting right now.” His shoulders slumped slightly, and his face changed to disappointment as he closed the office door and walked away.
My heart sank, but I recollected, unmuted myself, and calmly apologized to my teammates. I tried quickly to remember where I was and pick up where I had left off in my presentation as if nothing had happened. In minutes, I had disappointed the most important person in my life and annoyed about fifteen others, and I had no choice but to keep going.
Summer is hard for parents, but it’s also blissful. It’s conflicting feelings all at once a million times a day. Seeing my son learn new things while feeling pulled in a million other directions is hard. It feels impossible to cater to every demand uninterrupted while enjoying the fleeting time we have left of a short season in New England with a boy growing way too fast. There isn’t enough of me to go around from June until September.
To camp or not to camp
In my area, camps fill quickly, and sign-up starts January 1st. Every New Year, while others are recovering from a long night of celebration, I wake up early, sip my coffee, and create a spreadsheet to plan summer out, week by week, six months in advance. I then log in to each camp in a panic, trying desperately to avoid waitlists as I shell out hundreds of dollars per camp for nine straight weeks.
My summers as a child were never like this. I played outside with my siblings all day and rarely saw my stay-at-home mother. But I have an only child, my Wife and I work full time, and we live in a development where wide open spaces are limited in our neighborhood. Our kid can’t just hang around outside unattended all day; someone must ensure he’s not biking carefree alone on a busy road.
We spend our days managing various camp schedules and after-camp playdates to keep him safe and connected to other children.
Last year, I only signed him up for camps half of the time, which was completely unmanageable for all of us. So, this year, despite my deepest desire to let my kid be bored and nurture his creativity, he went to eight straight weeks of camp.
Let them be bored
Our culture has a really nasty way of promoting new research in favor of something parents should be doing while leaving the parents completely unsupported in their ability to execute based on the findings. It’s a mind-fuck. Boredom is one of those things.
Boredom is a frustrating experience for children, but navigating boredom helps them build critical life skills like problem-solving, self-play, creativity, and peace. What parent doesn’t want their kid to develop those?
We all know this and want to let our kids have this time, but no one mentions what bored kids do before those critical life skills kick in…they whine and try to get attention from everyone in the house, including their parents.
Whether you are a working or non-working parent, you are often getting interrupted.
Show me the money
Another way our culture says a big fuck you to parents is through childcare. In the U.S., the expectation is not that we take a lot of time off to be with our families during the summer. Instead, it’s that we continue to work in the same capacity as we have the rest of the year. Yet, the situation is entirely different. There is full-time school and partially subsidized after-care during the school year. During the summer…there is nothing.
If you work full-time, you are responsible for finding and paying for nine weeks of childcare. Good luck.
Babysitters are hard to come by and expensive if you can even find someone you trust. Camps are costly and only run until 12 or 2:30/3 P.M., if you are lucky. This isn’t at all aligned with the 9–5 workday schedule.
The common denominator is that it all costs money and requires a lot of planning and coordinating. Even those who can work from home and have a decent salary struggle. Imagine those of us already working multiple jobs to stay afloat and must show up to work all day.
We can’t be expected to work uninterrupted, full-time, without taking time off while managing the demands required to pay for and manage the logistics of kids at home.
Our society simply doesn't support parents and families. It says, “You’re the one who decided to have a kid. You figure it out.”
That’s an unfortunate and conflicting value for me and many other parents who realize that a child isn't a burden to society; it’s an asset, and the people raising them need support to do it well.
Screen time and entertainment
Until you are a parent and speak with other parents about screen time, you don't realize a very strong trend undergirds every conversation. Similar to the boredom paradox, we live in a screentime paradox. More and more research shows the harmful effects of prolonged screen time on children, and parents all know it. We all don’t want to give it to our kids, but we sometimes don’t have a choice.
When you speak to other parents about how much time their kids spend on tablets, it’s always a lie. No one wants to admit or disclose how much screen time their kids are getting. Hell, we don’t even want to admit it to ourselves. We know precisely why it isn’t good, but sometimes we feel we don’t have a choice.
During the summer, if my son is home and my Wife and I are both in meetings for the remainder of the afternoon and can’t be interrupted, he knows he has to do a series of tasks before he gets it. Still, he rushes through the tasks to get to tablet time and then watches it until we are done.
This starkly contrasts the school year when he isn’t allowed to watch it at all. However, it’s easier to regulate because there is less time when he is on his own, and when he is home, it’s after work so that we can focus on him.
Even being a woman in tech, a person pursuing responsible tech and acutely aware of the dangers of screen time, I find it challenging to eliminate it completely during the summer. It might be different if we lived in the countryside and he had siblings. But he’s an only child, and we live in suburbia. When no one can watch him and his main desire is to be outside, we must choose between his physical or mental well-being. So, we restrict what he can view and pray to a higher power that he will be OK because, truth be told when he’s watching something, I can actually focus on work.
Extra time with your children
This summer, even though my son was home, I felt like I never saw him. We connected quickly during camp and playdate pick-up and drop-off or in small blips during the time he was home when I emerged from my office to take a quick break, get a coffee, or just give him a hug.
At one point, I told myself I’d had enough. He is growing too fast. I only have ten more summers left with him, and each of those likely less and less time together.
I decided to take some time off and go on adventures with him. It was the best decision. The summer felt like a blur until I took time off, and then it slowed down.
Quality time with your kids slows time down. It’s those moments when we would go for a bike ride around the neighborhood, visit our wishing tree, or I’d take him out for ice cream that we really connected, and I will remember those times forever.
I realized that even though our society treats summer like any other time of the year, for parents, it’s not that at all. It’s a special time when our kids are still home with us, and because of our busy-burnout style culture, we view that as an inconvenience, but it’s anything but that.
It’s a gift.
You only get 18 summers with your child. And then you rarely see them again. Every year your child grows, they become more peer-focused and less parent-focused. Those moments when your child still wants you to see what they learned or cuddle with you while you sit on the front stoop. The times when they take walks with you and tell you about the creative ideas they have in their head. Those are fleeting.
Next summer, I’m taking more time off and using it to spend quality time with him. Not only does that build our relationship, but it also brings me peace during what otherwise is a stressful blur of a season.
Parents nurture and guide the next generation, and it’s hard work, distracting, and exhausting. But it’s also an incredible experience. It might not be a priority for the corporate world, but it’s a priority for us. If our culture doesn’t provide support, we should, at the very least, support each other.
Comments