Keeping your child engaged during Summer Vacation

It’s summer time and the weather is fine…and so is the mood. As a mom i really look forward to the summer vacation when i don’t have to get up early in the morning, scratch my head while groping in the fridge for my daughter’s lunch box, get my slobbering kid ready for school and in the evening after coming from office sit with her homework. Any vacation is a genuinely good respite, but the very thought of my two year old daughter marauding the house and turning it upside down for an entire month turns me absolutely jittery.

Well… Machiavelli that i am at home, I have the following ways of making her summer vacation a little useful:

First, of course she has to get her homework done. I remember, as a child, my first few days were totally engaged in books and school work, for i didn’t like the idea of rushing through my homework at the end of the holiday. Moreover, finishing the course or at least getting ahead with the school text books always helped me understand the same chapters when they were being taught in class. This helps the kid to absorb the matter well.

A substantial amount of time has to be meant for family and friends, especially relatives and cousins. We are all now accustomed to the idea of nuclear families and more often than not we have only one child or maximum two. The very concept of family, it’s values, ideas of sharing and caring, and growing up together ,attending to each other’s’ worries and fears is very essential to grow healthy adults. I am not surprised if children today are more self-centric because the society is making them such. All they care now is themselves and their needs at the cost of anything. Under such conditions, family trips, outings & reunions with cousins is essential. It also creates a bonding that is missing all year through. Family trips inculcate the habit of travelling, adjusting and accommodating in different conditions, meeting new people and having different experiences.

The concept of summer camp is prevalent now, though I personally don’t believe in it because i don’t remember attending any such camp in my childhood. Although if your child has any inclination towards fine arts or is willing to go to such camps then she/he should be encouraged. Summer camps teach and inculcate those aspects of our talent which remain unnoticed otherwise, it could be an intellectual summer camp, gym or swimming camps, music and dance camps, art and craft camps or even recitation or karate.

At home we can spend a quality time teaching them manners, family values and of course loving and putting up with them being naughty once in a while. We need to understand that they are kids, and have their own imagination and identity; we cannot forcefully make them do and perform what we want, rather let them create their own identity. Summer vacation is just a vacation not days spent in a boot camp, so let them enjoy, relax, gather enough energy for running through the entire year. Let studies be fun, education be a part of life, summer camps just an extended engagement, but let us put main emphasis on keeping them happy and content and letting them be. I agree with the quote “we cannot judge the caliber of a fish by asking it to climb a tree”.