June 10, 2007
High School is winding down, and those of us with teenagers in our homes are excited about not waking up in the dark but anxious about teens with too much time on their hands.
Summer for teens is a land full of milestones—small and large, good and bad—for both teens and their parents. My next-door neighbor told me that her pre-teen son was not signing up for the library reading program this year. The look of sorrow on her face reminded me how I felt when my kids no longer wanted to enroll in arts and crafts camps.
This rite of pre-teen passage moves them into the middle zone of teen summers when they’re too old to attend camps and too young to get jobs in them. That’s when we cajole them into taking a course or two in science or writing and get them to volunteer at nursing homes or community centers. We’re lucky if we have a pool nearby, and we have flextime to check in on them and make certain they’re not getting into trouble.
If your teen is an athlete, teenage summers are a time to get ready to open the wallet. Teens in a variety of sports travel to tournaments and team camps, and the teens usually don’t have jobs that are lucrative enough to help pay the expense.
Even if they could get good jobs, the practice and game time limits the number of hours they can work. It is exciting for the teenagers, and we love watching our teens’ games. However, when did we all stop going to the corner lot to have local tournaments?
Another summer milestone for teenagers is finding a job. My oldest daughter was a good babysitter, and she has made that skill into lucrative employment for the past six years. Babysitting is a good starter job because it is flexible, and teens can be young when they begin.
The next level of job is usually a lifeguard, camp counselor, grocery store or fast food employee. Following that, teens can work at malls. My seventeen year old awaits hearing from employers at a variety of stores. Ten applications are in to date, and no word has been received. These jobs are likely given to eighteen year olds and above.
This is another teenage summer passage—it is not always easy to find a job. It is not fun to be penniless in the summer when there is free time to hang with the gang. This is one of those teen milestones that is a lesson learned for the teen and a “that’s life’s reality” comment from parents.
Although we aren’t in the thick of it this summer, we have spent previous summers helping our teenagers get drivers’ licenses. This is a tougher rite of passage for parents than teenagers because we worry about our children on the road, and we know that this is the end of an era of shared car time.
As much as I complained about being a “soccer mom,” I certainly miss the conversations I had with my kids on the way to practices, events, and meetings. Last night my son and I went out to dinner, just to catch up in the midst of busy lives.
Summer milestones for teenagers bring new freedoms, joys, and responsibilities for both teens and parents. For every event that takes place, something is replaced.
As a good friend of mine once said, for every letting go, there is a grieving for something lost—even if that something lost is wonderful. The wonderful rites of summer passage for teenagers are memorable and, as with everything in life, inevitable.
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