School Cures Slothfulness

Lazy summer days are wonderful if you are not a lazy. For the indolent, summer days equal slothfulness with a sunburn. When the schedule is wide-open and everything seems to be elective, it is easy to opt to do nothing. During the school year, we are slugs robed as overachievers, but without someone telling us when and where to go, we return to our natural languid ways. This is the problem my family faces every summer. I offer to sign-up the kids for baseball, soccer, math, chess, and science camps, but they always decline. I load our summer schedule with lunchtime concerts, storytimes, splash parks and hiking trails, and they refuse to leave the house. I am just their mom, not an institution with authority that they actually respect. Choosing to be go-getters during the summer seems counterintuitive to the whole concept of summer vacation, but by the end of summer, my kids start seeking structure and stimulation even if they do not admit. A few days before school started, my eleven-year-old son was taking practice ACT tests just for fun, and my eight-year-old daughter cleaned all three bathrooms without being asked (although this was probably more about my incompetence than actual boredom).

So when school started this week, there was no sadness. We love school and all the scheduling headaches that come along with it. The homework, the nightly sustained silent reading, math facts, name writing practice, digging up creative and interesting things for show-and-tell, soccer practices, football practices, chess club, horseback riding, Chinese class, piano lessons and swimming lessons. Scheduling conflicts and time management nightmares abound. How I am I suppose to be at soccer practice, football practice and working at the library all at the same time? Calendar chaos. This is what I love about the school year. I morph into the pushy, overbearing part-time working mother trying to create “well-balanced” children while simultaneously developing killer Facebook status updates to make all my mom friends feel completely inadequate. My children transform into those “hurried children” that appear on 20/20 and 60 Minutes exposés. For nine months of the year, my naturally lazy children are overachieving athletic and academic superstars.

This is why we love school.

Summer Brain Drain

Widespread concern exists for the trend called "summer learning loss," which is what happens to children when they forget some of the information learned during the previous school year. Sometimes children may take weeks or months to regain the knowledge they lost while hanging out at the pool or playing video games in the basement for three months.

Across the United States, some schools have adopted year-round academic schedules, and many communities have developed camps, library events and fun educational activities to promote learning in active and creative ways during the summer months.

Although it is wonderful that this problem has garnered national attention, what research has been done on the phenomenon that I like to call the “Parental Summer Beatdown.” What inquiries have been done to discover what happens to the parental spirit every time a child says, “I am bored,” “There is nothing to do here,” or “This is boring” ? How much self-esteem do parents lose every time they pack up a picnic, sunscreen, an array of balls, Frisbees, and kites to take to the park only to have their children say “I don’t want to go”? Even worse than the children not wanting to go is taking the whole family to the park and having them want to leave after 20 minutes, six pushes on the swing and three times down the slide.

After a one week luxurious beach vacation, a trip to grandma’s house five states away, a soccer camp, a few festivals on the weekends, swimming at the neighborhood pool for a couple hours a day and a little Vacation Bible School for the religious types (although I find that many of non-pious friends are happy to lie about their church going habits and expose their children to dogma they don’t believe in just to get their kids out of the house at a low cost), what else is there to do? Yard sprinklers are so 2002; sidewalk chalk is also passé, and the concept of kicking your children outside after breakfast and allowing them back inside at dinner time is no longer considered to be safe or politically correct. Too much sun exposure is harmful, but excessive videogame playing and T.V. watching isn’t so good either.

What are exhausted, frustrated parents who don’t have degrees in early childhood education suppose to do? Every parenting magazine in the world is chock-full of fun ideas that allegedly will keep children busy and squealing in delight for months. These activities work on laboratory rats, not real children.

The only option is to pack their backpacks, fill their lunch boxes, give them a map to the school, and send them on their way. Eventually, teachers will return and let them in.