Set Your Teen Up for Summer Success

At the time I am recording this episode, it is still the crazy end of school madness at our house, but by the time this goes live, we will officially be on summer break. And so what better topic to talk about than setting your teenager up for summer success? So I don't know about you, but I used to wish and hope and wait for school to finally end so we could get out of the craziness and have a relaxing, calm summer.   We could be done with the homework and the sports and the busy schedules and the demands. And then we'd get to summer and I would feel such this sigh of relief. And then within a couple of weeks I was like, when is school starting again? Because these kids are driving me crazy, right? They won't do their chores.   They're on their phone all day. My house is a disaster. I cannot keep my pantry full of food. Can you relate to this? This is how I used to feel every single summer. But over the years, I have learned a few things along the way, and I wanna share those with you so that you can set your teenager up for summer success.   And when we're talking about summer success, yes, your teenager is gonna have a better summer, but also you are going to experience summer completely differently. There's gonna be less contention in your home, less fighting, less arguing, less battles. That's what I want for you this summer. I want you to be able to actually enjoy the summer with your teen, because really you don't have that many summers left.   So we gotta make the most of the ones we have. So let's jump right into the tips. Number one is find out what your teen wants their summer to look like. The easiest way to do this is just to ask them, what are your highest priorities for the summer? What's really important to you? What do you care about the most?   And then as you are thinking about your summer, you can weave that into your priorities for the summer. As I have done this with my teenagers, I've gotten a variety of answers over the years. Sometimes what's most important to them is they really wanna spend a lot of time with friends this summer.   Sometimes what's really important to them is they really wanna recover in their sleep and catch up on sleep. Sometimes what's really important to them is they wanna get a job and earn a bunch of money, and so their priorities change summer to summer, and we can't assume that we just know what those are, so we really have to ask them.   So one of my favorite ways to do this is what I call sticky note planning. And typically what we do is we gather our whole family together. Um, we have a family meeting and talk about what we want our summer to look like and we do this activity. But this year my family has been. Going a million different directions and no one's ever home at the same time.   So I realized you can totally do this with each kid one-on-one, and then gather all the sticky notes and do the last part of it. So basically what you do is you have each child write the things that they wanna do this summer on a sticky note, one idea per sticky note. And one of the great things that happens as you do this is your kids are gonna remember the things that you've done in the past, and you're gonna know that the things that you do over the summer really matter to them because they're gonna have all of these fun memories, but they're also gonna have a lot of new ideas.   And as they come up with ideas, your other kids are gonna see those ideas and they're gonna come up with more ideas. You're gonna have. So many fun ideas for summer. So that's the first benefit. But then you're gonna take all of these sticky notes wherever you're collecting them. We like to just do it on a wall, and you're gonna have each child pick two sticky notes to put in the, definitely we have to do this category.   Once everyone has a chance to add a couple of sticky notes to that, definitely we have to do this category. You're gonna let them sort the rest of the sticky notes on the wall into two more categories. Number one is we'd like to do this. And number two is, eh, if we don't get to it, it's okay. This is going to give you such great insight into what is most important to your family this summer, but it's also gonna help each of your kids see that they are not the only one who has some summer dreams.   Setting your summer up this way will reduce so much of the conflict and pushback that comes when you wanna do something that one child wants to do and another really doesn't. This is just a method that works well for our family. Give it a try. See if it works. If it doesn't, no big deal. Just ask your kids what they want their summer to look like.   Number two is set realistic expectations for the summer. Just like anything else in life, summer will be both amazing and terrible at times. One of the biggest pain points for parents during the summer is hearing their kids say things like, I'm bored, and I want you to know that boredom is not a problem.   You need to fix. Boredom is simply an emotion your child is experiencing. Experiencing negative emotion is an important part of your teenager's development. If you want them to be emotionally healthy, I talk about this all the time. You have to allow them to experience negative emotions, and so boredom is one of those negative emotions.   When you jump in and try and fix it by giving them other things to do, instead of feeling bored, you are doing two things. Number one, you're teaching them that boredom is a problem, which is going to create a lot more tension around boredom. Whenever they feel bored, they're gonna think that you should fix it and that this is a bad thing.   The second thing that happens is that you are taking that ex. Experience of the negative emotion of boredom away from them. And so they actually don't learn how to process that emotion, how to work through it and get to the other side and come up with creative solutions and ideas for what they wanna do instead.   So boredom is not a problem. Have realistic expectations that boredom is gonna be part of your summer, and that's totally fine. Another realistic expectation to set is that your teen won't be excited about everything you want to do. Even if you've done the sticky note planning and they've all been on board, that everyone has stuff they wanna do, they still have stuff that they might not wanna do.   Maybe you want family time and they want friend time, sometimes it's gonna be a conflict. That's okay. Not everybody has to want to do all the things all the time. The last realistic expectation I want you to really consider as you're setting expectations for your summer is that your teenager really cares about three things.   Friends, sleep, and fun. These are a really important part of your teenager's summer. Knowing that and planning on it is going to save you so much frustration down the road when all they want to do is hang out with their friends, sleep, and do things that are fun. And that doesn't mean you have to let them do all those things.   It just means that you know and expect that they are going to want to do those things. My third tip is to plan your own fun. Make sure that you have a plan for incorporating fun for yourself into the summer because it is a million degrees here in Arizona. In the summer, we do a lot of swimming and we often invite a lot of families over to swim with us.   And over the many years of doing this, I have found a pattern that I wanna share with you. When I put on my swimsuit and I go out with the kids to swim and I actually get in the water, I am so much happier afterward. It is that simple act of allowing myself to have some of the fun instead of just coordinating the fun for everyone else.   So I wanna challenge you to plan on at least weekly, but preferably daily, doing something fun just for you. And it can be with your kids or it can be without them. It can be as simple as blasting the music in your car, but do something that makes summer fun for you. The fourth tip is to plan for the problem areas.   Now, I know you know what the problem areas are in your family, but I want you to think through it. Think through the stuff that you don't like about summer, and decide how you're gonna handle it in advance. And when I say decide how to handle it, I don't want you to think about all the rules that you're gonna set up around this, although that might be part of the conversation.   The questions I really want you to ask yourself are, What kind of mom do I want to be when this happens? How do I want to feel when this happens and how do I want to respond when this happens? Now, again, I know you know the problem areas for your family, but I'm just gonna share a couple of ideas of things you might want to consider planning for food and snacks.   I feel like I can never keep my pantry full in the summer. Everyone is eating all the time, and sometimes that's a problem for me and I know it's a problem for other moms too. So how do you wanna handle that? Kids being on their phones or asking for screen time. This is a total problem area for a lot of moms.   How do you want to handle it when it comes up sleeping in all day. This is something your teenager is going to want to do most likely. So how are you going to handle it when it comes up? And chores. Chores are always a hot button issue, right? With our teenagers. How do you wanna handle it when they don't wanna do their chores or when they push back or when they just don't do them?   What are you going to do? So remember those three questions. What kind of mom do you wanna be? How do you wanna feel, and how do you want to respond? And the final tip I have for you today is to create pockets of structure in your summer. I know that we all are ready for a break from the schedules and we're ready for some freedom and just relax time.   But if you don't have any structure built into your summer, that is when you're going to start feeling that frustration come up all the time because you don't have a plan for how you want things to go. So it's an absolute guarantee that nothing is going according to plan, and I promise you're gonna feel that inside of you a couple of ways to create pockets of structure in your summer.   So your summer doesn't feel rigid, but it also feels like it's a little bit in your control, is to make sure your kids have either a goal or a project or an activity that gives them something to do to work toward. Your team is probably going to resist this because they're just ready for a break from all of it.   But I have found that when my kids have a goal or a project or an activity or something, they are working toward, they have such a better summer because they have a little bit of direction and movement in their life. Another thing you can do is create routines for those problem areas. One of the ways we've done this in the past is around screen time.   My kids were not allowed to be on screens until a certain time of the day, and then only at that time of the day if they had completed their chores for the morning. If they had spent some time outside and if they had gotten some exercise in the day. And that just allowed us to create a little bit of structure in our day, like a landmark that they could look forward to and I could look forward to instead of them asking me about screens all day long.   Now that's just an example of something that has worked for our family, and I'm definitely not saying that's what you should do, but you need to look at your problem areas in your family and decide what are some small pockets of structure and routine that I can create around those problem areas. And the final thing I wanna say about pockets of structure in your summer days is that you need to make sure that you communicate those pockets of structure to your family and ideally, get some feedback from them.   Make sure they buy in to these ideas, because if you just have a structure that you've created in your brain and you expect everyone to follow it without communicating it and getting them on board with it, that is not gonna go well, and it is gonna set you up for a whole lot of frustration this summer.   I hope these tips have been really helpful and that they will set you up for a really fantastic summer with your teenager. But I also wanna invite you to join me inside my Enjoy coaching community this summer, because as things fall through the cracks, as frustration comes up as your teen isn't cooperating and you're spending so much more time around them this summer.   I wanna be able to support you and I can do that through Marco Polo Coaching and through all the resources there inside the Enjoy community. So check out the link in the show notes and find out how you can join me inside there and get all the support you need this summer to have a fantastic time with your teen. https://client.jenbelltate.com/membership