Yesterday, a friend shared the link to an article titled, EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Fill up summer to slow it down, and it’s a good read, but also one that made me stop and think about our upcoming summer.
It raised important points for any family that likes adventure but also has to consider whether and how that adventure works for different family members. It made me ponder, how can this summer work for both parents and kids?
The gist of the article was that the creation of the perception of time and of memories differs for an adult vs. a child. To quote:
- “Some research shows children perceive time differently than adults, at least very young children…. It feels like summer passed more slowly when we were children, because we perceived everything passing more slowly.”
- “Our “working memory, attention, and executive function” were still developing and our “neural transmission is in effect physically slower compared to adults. This in turn affects how they perceive the passage of time,” according to neuroscientist Patricia Costello, PhD, in an NBC news report on the subject.”
- “Modern research supports the 1885 advice of philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. He said to lengthen time, ‘Fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things.’”
- ““When you do lots of different things, time flies. But we perceive time in two different ways: we judge how fast it’s going right now, and we also look back, asking ourselves how long it felt. We partly make that judgment by considering how many new memories we made, so the more different things you pack into one weekend, the longer that weekend will feel when it comes to Monday morning.””
Huh. I’d never heard these things before. But I’m glad I have now before going full bore into this summer. There’s always been a kind of lack of balance to our summers – I’ve been inclined to fill up our summer with camps and trips, our kids say they want more downtime, but the downtime leads to arguing, too much device use, and general unhappiness in the household.
Quick story – during one summer vacation, our kids said they wanted downtime, and we let them have it, but within an hour, an argument between our boys went from wrestling to shouting to one throwing the other’s flip flop onto the roof of the garage. Within 30 more minutes, the parents were so irritated with the kids’ arguing that we loaded everyone into the car and spent the next 10 days doing day trips.
I have also heard that kids process information from their day during downtime – so when they say, I’m bored, the correct response is, that’s GREAT! As opposed to, let me fill up your time with something else. I try to respect that, but honestly, it’s not easy.
So, what’s the happy medium? I think for us, it may include these 4 things:
- Plan out our summer now.
- Give the kids the opportunity for input into the plan – our previous experience creating visual guides will give us, well, a guide.
- Build in downtime but talk about what that looks like and agree on what’s okay downtime vs. downtime that melts your brain.
- Carry out the plan – meaning the adventure plan, and the downtime one – to make memories through the adventures but allow for processing through the downtime.
Here’s hoping this approach will give us a summer where everyone in our neurodiverse family wins. Or at least breaks even.
Here are two questions for you:
- First, what do you recommend for a summer of memory-making for our neurodiverse family and others – where and what do you suggest going and doing near your home and far afield?
- Second, what works for your kids for downtime?
With summer right around the corner, we appreciate your responses! If you’re already having summer adventures, post pictures for us! Your responses will help us and others rocketaround while taking a few breaks to fuel up.