I can't possibly be the only person staring down the end of the school year (Friday! Crap!) with a good bit of anxiety, right?
I'm pretty much selling a kidney to get her in the summer program at her preschool, so three days a week she'll be with her friends and letting Mama work instead of wandering into my office nook every three minutes informing me "It's a hard time to wait," luckily. But my friends with older kids are dreading the inevitable "I'm bored" whining that comes with summer.
"Parenting expert" Michelle Borba answered iVillage readers' questions about how to handle their kids come summer. Unsurprisingly, it seems the type of parent who overschedules their kids half to death during the school year don’t really know what to do with them come summer, nor do the kids have any idea what to do with themselves.
Borba, however, criticizes that parenting style on the one hand, cautioning parents not to become their kids' social directors all summer long, and then proceeds to give parents a laundry list of, you guessed it, parent-directed activities to try. Sigh.
I know this sounds curmudgeonly, but when I was a kid the only structured activities we had were maybe swimming lessons here or a week of daycamp there. And both my parents worked. Even our awesome teen babysitter sort of let us free-range all summer long. No parent was dreaming up fun little activities for us – we came up with our own ideas and negotiated with our friends on our own. I learned to enjoy my own company and to be a self-starter as a result. I hope today's kids can learn the same.
