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Rookie Mom

Summertime for kids should be easy, breezy

By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published May 21, 2006

My hometown of Raleigh, N.C., came very close this week to mandating that all its schools would stay in session year-round. At the last minute, the board decreed that many schools, but not all, would enroll children for 12 months of the year. This isn't a new trend. Plenty of schools around the country have been doing this for some time and students, parents and teachers like the schedule fine.

But I know I couldn't stand year-round schools. I think every child is entitled to a long summer. A three-week break each quarter is not enough time for kids to really decompress. Their minds and bodies should have a long rest from the daily demands of school and homework. Their days should roll by one after the other until they can't remember if it's Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Summer should be long enough for children to get bored. The words of Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen have become my annual mantra.

"Downtime is when we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky," she wrote several years ago. "I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it. A hiatus that passes for boredom is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity."

It's not until children have long days with nothing on the schedule, no homework, no soccer, no ballet class, no TV and no computer, that they resort to coming up with their own ways to occupy themselves. They may end up writing a poem. Or it may be something far less noble, like making dirt hamburgers.

That's what my sister and I did for a while one summer in the corner of our front yard. We built an oven out of some loose bricks we dug up from an overgrown flower bed. Then we molded burgers out of black mud and baked them in the sun. We used dried, brown magnolia leaves for the buns, which we smeared with real ketchup we snuck out of the house. We made up menus and signs.

It wasn't rocket science. We didn't really learn anything from it. But we did think it up by ourselves and had a few great blasts of creativity as we added new components to set up. It's comforting for me to think back to that shaded corner of the yard and know that at one time in my life I had so little to do that I built a restaurant with my sister.

That's why summer is a rite of passage all kids should enjoy for a few years until they are old enough to get summer jobs. Parents should heed Quindlen's words and not overbook or over plan. It's fine to have four days or 14 days in a row without camps, vacations or play dates. If kids are in camps during the week because parents are working, let Saturday and Sunday be empty days. You really don't need to fill them with day trips, zoos, shopping or amusement parks.

Ask adults what they remember from summers (the ones before they took on summer jobs) and many will still get a far away look in their eyes.

"I would wait for the sun to go down, then we'd catch lightning bugs. Then, I know this sounds kind of cruel, but we'd take that florescent part off of them and fill glass jars with them like they were lanterns. Then we'd see how long the light would last," remembers Jeannie Maultsby, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and Miami. She also spent many hours at the library. It was the only place her mother would let her go by herself.

Maultsby still has the "dolphin awards" she earned for summer reading programs. Was this just a way to pass the free days of summer or did it help shape her future? Maultsby is now a librarian at St. Petersburg's West Community Library.

Travis Sherman, who also works at the library, remembers when people were allowed to build bonfires at St. Pete Beach and her family would go out there to roast hot dogs. But most summer days were spent playing games with neighborhood kids. One summer her brother got the idea to draw a giant game board on the driveway with chalk. The kids were the game pieces who moved forward and backward when they rolled the dice.

My friend Amy Giskin quickly reels off a list of activities she remembers from her young summers. "I used to do synchronized swimming in the pool with my girlfriends. We made crafts for our mothers and then they were walking around with bracelets made out of God knows what," she said, laughing. "Just running through the sprinkler in our yards. We'd wash the cars. We'd do lemonade stands. We used to get big rocks and bring them home and paint them. Like I painted a fish on one or a scene with grass and flowers."

Another friend, Marylee Zink, remembers spending entire days playing Monopoly with 10 friends gathered around a board in somebody's basement.

"People would come and go because they had to eat lunch or dinner and then somebody would stand in their stead," she recalls. "The summers really were free. We didn't have to worry about somebody stealing kids. And there wasn't much TV for us to watch then."

Zink also spent many summer hours painting and drawing. Art was a hobby she didn't have much time for during the school year. Today she is an artist, a teacher at the Arts Center in St. Petersburg and has served as Artist-in-Residence for the Pinellas County Arts Council.

For Anne Bristol, summer meant the book mobile would make its weekly trips to her tiny lakeside town in Michigan. "In those days parents didn't take their kids everywhere. It was expected that summer vacation was when we had to figure out what we were going to do. The book mobile became my summer oasis and my brother's, too.

"We would just sit for hours and hours in there. I think the limit was five books and I would try to sweet talk the bookmobile driver to let me have one more," she said. Then Bristol would go home to the room she shared with her three brothers and neatly arrange the books on a little shelf next to her top bunk. By the next week, she had read them all and was eagerly waiting for the bookmobile's return.

"I think I read every Nancy Drew. That got me hooked on mysteries and to this day I still love a good mystery," said the Brooksville middle school teacher. "Still summertime is my reading time. We get out of school Wednesday and I cant wait to go to the library."

[Last modified May 21, 2006, 09:28:05]