Remember when summer break used to mean riding bikes, playing in the park, going swimming at the neighborhood pool, and sitting outside laughing with your friends while enjoying a cool sweet treat? After nine months of bell schedules, bus rides, tests, and endless homework, you could look forward to some down time. Time to just relax, be a kid and have fun. Sometimes, a family vacay was even thrown into the mix when it was affordable. But even if you didn’t get to go away to grandma’s or some theme park, you still had all those days of fun in the sun to look forward to; making memories with your friends that would last a lifetime.


But it seems that nowadays, summer is just school in an alternate universe. Now, more and more parents feel compelled to sign their children up for academic, sports, and fine arts camps in an effort to give their young scholar a competitive edge. Even enjoying a good book or two has now been replaced by almost mandatory enrollment in the summer reading contest at your local library, which is chock full of all kinds of enticing incentives that are designed to ratchet up your child’s interest in reading. Now, before you light the torches and storm the castle on me, let me just say that I am a HUGE advocate of providing my children with varied learning and development opportunities. I always have been. All I’m saying is that you have to be careful not to get sucked into the popular notion that if your child doesn’t have his nose stuck in a book every day of summer break, or he’s not attending an 8-week-long STEM training camp, it’ll lessen his chances of being successful in life. That’s just not true.


What is true is that if children are not given an appropriate amount of downtime to just enjoy things that they like to do, or to just be lazy or bored sometimes, they may later have difficulty developing a healthy work-life balance as well as form and keep healthy relationships. We need look no further than our own overworked and overwhelmed generation for proof of this.

What I'm promoting here is not a choice of all or nothing, but more importantly, BALANCE, and it begins with you, Mom and Dad. When you shift your focus from just doing to actually being, just like everything else you do, it will rub off on your child and he/she will become better equipped to setting their own proper priorities. The pay-off will be a very meaningful and enjoyable life. If you love our child as much as I believe you do, that's ultimately all you really want for them anyway.

Now get out there and enjoy those beautiful summer days together!