Summer Vacation – Helping Your Teens & Preteens Live Their Best, Intentional Life.
For most families in the Pacific Northwest we are in our final week or two of school before summer break. If your kids are like mine, they have been counting down the days since Easter. We’ve been singing the Phineas and Ferb theme song, “Today Is Gonna Be a Great Day” song for weeks!
Once our babies start kindergarten we have only 12 summers with them until they graduate. I know the summers can seem long, especially by mid August, but let that sink in. One dozen summer breaks until they are high school graduates and have more freedom to make their own decisions than ever before.
It is crucial as parents that we are intentional to teach and lead our kids with each season of life that they are in. Once adults and out of the house, what do you hope that your children’s memories are of their childhood at home? What type of young adults do you hope they become? Because each summer break is almost a quarter of the year it is an ideal time to help them create habits and shape their schedules.
It is estimated that the average teen spends 9 hours a day on screens. If that is true for your kiddo, is that shaping them into the adult that you hope they become? I know it is not always easy to convince your teen or preteen that what is best for them is actually best for them, but nonetheless, our job as parents is to train and teach, popular or not. They probably will not thank us now for boundaries, but they most definitely will be grateful once they are adults.
HABITS THAT LINE UP WITH VALUES
So how can we make a plan to live an intentional summer?
-
Write down what your core values as a family are.
-
Make a plan of how to invest in each core value this summer. Below is a sample of what our family’s list is.
At the start of summer we have a conversation during dinner or a family meeting and clearly communicate that we are all going to be living intentionally this summer (parents included). We allow for conversation and input from the kids (that is how our their daily screen time went from 60 minutes to 90). Ultimately, however, we are the parents and we decide what the final plan will be.
On the summer days that both Tyler and I are away from the home we will print off a check list for each kiddo and ask them to be sure to check each box to help keep them on track. That has been a useful to ensure that they aren’t in front of the TV or on their iPod for the entire day while we are at work or appointments.
For their daily Bible reading plan our kiddos will be continuing the One Year Bible Plan that we started as a family in January. Our youngest one has chosen to only do the New Testament portion of the plan and she’s fallen behind with that during the school year. That’s not a problem at all. The spirit of this practice is to create habits that align with our core value to be a disciple of Jesus, it is not about legalism. She will just start the reading for the first day of summer and go from there. For Easter this year we got all three kids new CBS Study Bibles . The translation is easy for them to understand and there are study notes at the bottom of each page that brings clarity and more information to many of the verses.
If you have younger kiddos and are looking for an age appropriate summer Bible reading plan, I wrote a post a few years ago called Summer Bible Reading Plan For The Littles (linked here).
I’d love to hear from you! What are your family’s core values and how do you plan to intentionally live them out this summer?
