One of the basic requirements of childhood is the capacity to pursue an area of a special interest and be able to manage the inherent frustration of trying to master the challenges of that pursuit.  As parents you have the responsibility of guiding your children’s summer schedule and cultivating a daily and weekly rhythm that can capture your child’s imagination while helping him/her learn about his/her interests in our shared world.

During the preschool years, your child’s experience of summer is primarily going to be based on how you as parents manage your summer experience.  It is in your child’s interest (as well as your own) that summers are punctuated by family “adventures.”  The adventures can range from a family picnic in the park with friends or extended family, to a day at the beach, to a trip to the zoo, to strawberry picking, to weekend camping, to a family trip.  The important element of the adventures is the meaningfulness of the experience to you as parents and your commitment to wanting to share that meaning and joy with your child.  Those experiences then become the background for your child’s desire to step into their own adventures as they become older.  So, children who have loved going to the beach may want to become lifeguards as teens.  Children who have loved camping may pursue Scouting.  It is during preschool summers that you are sensitizing your child to appreciate what life has to offer that can bring joy and satisfaction.

The school age child (6-10) is now ready to have experiences away from the family in order to help them feel engaged successfully in the world.  During summer, the child can explore in more depth the rich complexity of interactions with peers while pursuing body/mind enrichment activities.  Although summer camp (both day and overnight) does afford the kind of opportunities being referred to, it is certainly possible to construct a summer with the necessary ingredients as parents if you have the desire and discipline.  It is more enjoyable and doable if you are able to collaborate with one or two other families and create a weekly schedule that allows for cooperative experiences.  Your child then benefits from the need to get along with different adults and other children while pursuing age-appropriate activities.  You benefit by having more time and space and most importantly by being able to share the experience of parenting with other parents.

The preteen (11-13) child needs increased opportunity to be with other preteens—especially of the same gender.  The preteen has significant normative anxiety about their bodies and independence, and without appropriate opportunities to explore those challenges, they are likely to be unhappy, demanding, and even unkind.  More than at any other time, the preteen needs to be with his/her peers with appropriate levels of supervision.  It is more difficult as parents to organize the summers on your own with age group unless you have a well-established summer schedule and routine with others from the past.  This age group is best engaged during the summer by camps and organized peer group experiences.  Physical activity is especially important as the developing body needs to be appreciated for what it is able to do when challenged.  Meeting challenges and experiencing mastery and failure while in the company of peers is the critical paradigm for the preteen.

The teenager (14-17) needs to begin to partner with you as parents in helping to shape the structure for their summer.  At this point, the teenage child should have some beginning awareness of the direction of his/her special interests and summer is the time to follow those beginning passions. Whether in sports, music, art, theater, work, or academics, the summer provides a unique opportunity for teenagers to gain authentic experiences with their potentially life-enhancing passions.  Teenagers vary enormously in how much structure and support they need from you as parents.  You will need to lead the process.  Having a summer to “relax” from the stress of the school year is not an acceptable option.  Summer for children and youth should not be about relaxation—it needs to be about enrichment and engagement.

​In fact, appropriate, empathic frustration is essential to healthy psychosocial development.  Emotional maturity requires the capacity to manage frustration and postpone gratification.  Empathic frustration means that you sensitively help your child confront challenges that they are capable of doing in a manner that maximizes their effort and results in an authentic sense of achievement.  That kind of mastery builds self esteem.  Empathic frustration is the fruit and vegetables of emotional metabolism.  Children raised on “ice cream” will always seek the quick, emotional fix of sensation seeking and avoid the work of preparing for life.  Gratification of children is relatively easy—empathic frustration requires commitment to your child’s potential.  You are your child’s personal trainer—you are the one to decide how heavy a weight they are to lift.  The weight must be heavy enough to feel challenging, but not so heavy that it feels overwhelming.  How you respond to your child's challenges will influence how your child reacts to the normative frustrations and challenges of life outside the home.

Cell phones, TV, video games, computers, the Internet, tablets, MP3 players, digital cameras, have become ever present tools in our daily life.  They allow us to structure and dramatically filter the data that reaches our brain and influences our mind.  As parents we want to influence the development of our children’s minds by fostering experiences that are growth promoting, appropriate, sufficiently challenging, and diverse.  The formative years ( Ages 6-12 ) are times for a sampling of life’s experiential buffet.  The primary danger of technology for children is that it restricts their direct experience with their physical/social environment and creates an unrelenting expectation that the mind needs continual electronic data that is attractively packaged in order to feel engaged.  Vicarious, packaged entertainment and even learning can leave little patience for quiet reflection, incidental socialization, imaginative play, and reading.  The extremely engaging packaging of electronic media has its own structure and imagination and it easily can dwarf and overwhelm the child’s budding initiative to develop his or her own discipline and creativity.  Exposure and involvement with technology needs to be carefully harnessed by parents so that children use technology as enrichment and do not substitute it for life experience.  A particularly seductive dynamic that can easily occur with access to the Internet is an erosion of parental authority.  Because answers to almost any concrete question are available with a few keystrokes, children can easily be left with the impression that their access to this knowledge makes them feel mature and sophisticated.  When paired with the child’s ability to feel “connected” to so many peers and others, they can also begin to feel as if they are quite socially involved and may not need to feel as connected to parents.  When parents are significantly involved with electronic media or interrupt their family interactions to respond to electronic requests for attention ( i.e. phone and text ), children experience what parents believe is the priority in the family.  Children begin to drift away from the dinner table, avoid casual interactions with family members, and seek out the instant engagement of the tablet, computer, or phone.  As parents your role becomes marginalized.  By middle school you can easily become the servants to your overly indulged children as your children come to rely on social media, instant information access, and unrelenting entertainment access as “superior” replacements for family interactions and meaningful respect for parents.  The ability to use the tools of technology is critical for all children to develop in our society, but parents who wish to maintain meaningful relationships with their children into the teenage years must actively manage how technology is integrated into the everyday life of the family.

Family life is complicated, demanding, frustrating, and stressful.  It is also wonderful when it soothes, replenishes, and nourishes.  Parents with infants know the anxious intensity of their hungry child’s anticipation of the next spoonful of apple sauce, the warm embrace of their baby’s eye contact as it briefly looks up from sucking from the breast or bottle, and the joyous smile of their three year old blowing out the candles on his or her birthday cake.  Food and needs celebrate our lives.  All occasions and milestones include food because of food’s ability to bind us together in a shared experience.  The shared meal helps us open doors to each other in ways that are primitive and precious.  As parents you will want to take full advantage of food’s potential to connect and even define your family.

The time to start is at the beginning.  Your baby needs to experience hunger and then satisfaction.  That basic dynamic is the source for all our developmental challenges.  We must have a need, we must be able to experience an appropriate amount of frustration in relationship to that need or want, and we must then be able to experience some satisfaction in relation to it.  You need to feed your baby when he or she is clearly hungry and you want to evolve your baby’s eating to be meal-like.  The capacity of your baby to recognize the hunger of and to then anticipate the satisfaction of the meal gives rise to the psychosocial space needed to fully enjoy meals with you.  Not all meals need to be eaten together; however, it is optimal if one predictable meal per day can be shared by family members.  Work schedules, school demands, sports demands, social desires, and electronics can all serve to interfere with the family meal.  If mealtime has been established as a basic structure in the family during the first three years of your child’s life, then it is likely to endure the stresses of later developmental demands.  The importance of parents sharing meals as both parents and as marital/life partners should also be highlighted.  The demands of parenthood are considerable and as a couple you deserve and need to share predictable satisfaction together.  The family meal provides you with that.  Your children benefit when they can sit back and listen to the music of your voices and the substance of your living.  You are giving them an invaluable insight into the experience of living and the joys and challenges of adulthood.  But most of all, they are seeing how the people that care for them the most, care for each other.  You are teaching them about life.  As a couple you are responsible for helping your children see that as two people you are committed to the happiness and well being of yourself and your partner.  The family is not exclusively for the welfare of children; it also is responsible for serving the needs of the adults as a couple and each adult as an individual.

Meals start with planning, then preparation, then serving, then eating, then ending, and finally cleanup.  As parents you need to consider each step and how you want the tasks associated to be accomplished.  As much as possible, children should be included in all phases from as young as possible.  The ability to feel engaged in the process, increases the experience of meaning and connection.  Thinking about what foods need to be put on the shopping list, assisting at the grocery store, helping to put food away after purchase—those tasks help give children an appreciation for what goes into preparing for a meal.  Assisting with food preparation—dumping cut up carrots or peppers in a pot, punching bread dough, shaping cookies, stirring soup, “playing with food” can be a real job for children especially when they do it with you.  The smells of your food cooking become the soothing anticipation for your upcoming meal.  You are teaching your children how to work and postpone gratification until the time is right.  You are teaching them to resist temptation and to manage their hunger for the greater good of a shared meal with people they love and who love them.

Your children should help you set the table.  By age three or four, they will be able to help, even though it will be more work for you when they do.  However, the work you do with them now, when for them it is like play, helps to prepare them to accept their responsibility for helping the family to function.  Your children are not there for you to serve them or for them to serve you.  You share your lives together and you need to teach them what it means to be a useful part of the family and how they are to become useful members of society.

Serving the meal is best done with everyone either at the table or helping with the serving itself.  Once the food is completely served, then the meal can commence.  If prayers are employed, then the need is ushered in by that process.  The meal itself is a time for general checking in with the mood and daily life of each member.  It happens informally, but a rhythm will develop and over time each person develops a good measure of his or her family members.  Parents can easily assess the attitudes of children and potential conflicts.  Children can listen in on the tales of the adult lives of their parents.  Manners are taught and values are imparted.  Family members share a common space and time that becomes the family heartbeat.  Comments and compliments about the food selection, preparation, and presentation help everyone feel good.  As hungry bellies are filled, there is a sense of warmth and quiet joy.  It is now time to clean up.  Children should be expected to help as much as possible while parents should supervise and support; try to have fun.  Postpone dessert until after cleanup—it helps get the work done.  Be generous with compliments as you all work together.  A successful meal with your family is the single most influential tool in the construction of a family that can nurture and guide each of its members in an atmosphere of warmth and shared responsibility.

You are responsible for creating a family that facilitates the meaningful engagement of each of its members into society.  As parents, you will not feel satisfied or successful unless your children can make the transition into school, into meaningful relationships with peers, and into substantive activities in the community.  Therefore, as parents your family needs to adopt attitudes and behaviors that will support success in those arenas.  Notice that your responsibility as parents is not to gratify your children.  Immediate gratification is the equivalent of a sweet dessert - it goes down easy, but it has little nutritional value  In fact, appropriate, empathic frustration is essential to healthy psychosocial development.  Emotional maturity requires the capacity to manage frustration and postpone gratification.  Empathic frustration is the fruit and vegetable dynamic tension that promotes emotional muscular development.  Children raised on “ice cream” will always seek the quick, emotional fix of sensation seeking and avoid the work of preparing for life.  Gratification of children is relatively easy—empathic frustration requires commitment to your child’s potential.  You are your child’s personal trainer—you are the one to decide how heavy a weight they are to lift.  How you manage your responsibility will, in large part, influence how your child reacts to the normative frustrations of life outside your home.

Birth to Three Months:
The first three months of your baby’s life are critical for establishing a basic rhythm of predictable frustration and satisfaction. It is the vegetative function of eating, sleeping, and basic physical/sensory comfort that are the primary challenges for your newborn who has been suddenly thrust into the world.  You must help your newborn develop homeostasis  --  the inner belief/experience that when he/she develops a basic specific need, that need will be appropriately responded to.  It is your parental empathy for your newborn and your commitment to your vulnerable baby that prepares you for responding to your newborn’s language of cries, whines, facial expressions, and body postures.  By the end of three months, you want your baby to feel secure and safe in his or her body needs and basic interactions with you.

Three months to Age Two-and-a-half Years:
During this time period, your baby’s brain is exploding in growth as he/she begins to emerge into a separate person with a unique mind.  It is a time of basic exploration with associated excitement and frustration.  Basic skills for walking, talking, and self-control are being practiced and the capacity to engage others with reciprocity is initiated.  Your child now needs you as a personal trainer to help him/her negotiate and master the basics of environmental exploration while remaining secure in the ever evolving needs he/she has for your support and guidance.  It is during this state that you child’s mind begins to appreciate its separateness from yours and that nascent awareness needs your sensitive attention.  By age two-and-a half to three, you want your child to feel capable exploring their surroundings under the supervision of a caring adult in a manner that allows for your child’s ability to try out engaging with peers while beginning to feel that initial frustration with learning that can lead to mastery and satisfaction.  By age three, your child’s basic brain/mind operating system will, to a substantial degree, have been established.  Your child must now use that operating system to negotiate the experiential software program it will be subjected to.

Three Years to Five Years:
You must now help your child feel successfully engaged in the meaningful exploration of learning about the world by providing everyday experiences that provide normative opportunities for interpersonal, gross motor, fine motor, and intellectual engagement.  The daily exposure to such experiences that are embedded with a caretaking adult system is the best way to exercise the muscles needed for preparing for school while enhancing your child’s basic skill set and beginning self-esteem.  By the time your child is five or six, he/she needs to be able to take that skill set and use it without feeling that he/she has to be taken care of by the adult supervising them.

Age Five to Seven:
In our society, this time period is absolutely critical and it is during this time that your child will reveal whether he or she has developed the necessary requirements for becoming an acceptable member of society.  Your child must be able to manage his/her frustrations and big feelings without being overly disruptive or dysfunctional.  The equipment that your child has been building to cope with frustration must now be able to withstand the pressures of living within a group of peers that is led by an authority whose job is to teach and nurture your child.

Living together as a couple creates stressful dynamics from our pasts but thrusting ourselves into parenthood fully engages us in the need to manage the unresolved angers, fantasies, and losses that burdened our own experiences of children in our families of origin.  Child rearing is inherently conservative because it relies on the templates of our imagined past experiences with our parents to guide how we react as parents.  We now must act as authorities—that is, as a couple we will have to make constant decisions about the welfare of our offspring in an atmosphere where advice comes from everywhere and guarantees from nowhere.  How you as a couple learn to mange your family’s decision making responsibilities will not only affect how your children respond to authority but it will profoundly influence how well you as a couple can withstand the inevitable stresses of daily life.  As authorities, you are responsible for setting behavioral expectations with appropriate reinforcements and consequences and for establishing a lifestyle that is sufficiently nurturing to each family member.  We fall in love and decide to have a life partner in order to share, but we find that life with children demands endless decisions and each one can be an opportunity for conflict and injury.  The successful couple evolves an appreciation for the wisdom of the partner in specific domains and encourages and supports that partner to exercise that authority as needed.  The supportive partner offers ideas and consultation in order to feel that options are considered.