Reply to For the first time in my life I hate summer.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
These things have to be decided well in advance - it's like registering for courses in middle and high school and charting a course to a good college (which I hope you're doing).

Before school ended, you should have discussed this as a family, and thrashed out a compromise: the part in the Venn diagram where their interests, your money and your logistics coincide.

They are not allowed to do nothing.
They have to do something constructive, either structured by others (camps and classes) or themselves (in that case they have to agree to being checked every now and then by you).
They also have to keep up their academic skills, so as to start the new school year without a hitch.

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OP here.  Thank you for the kind responses. How do you chart a good course to college?  Are all of your summer activities college focused?  Starting at what age?  (DH and I went part time and finished, but not the conventional way.)  I know this sounds basic to most of you, so I really appreciate the helpful responses.  I don't know how to guide my children, frankly. DH's and my parents are deceased, so we have no guidance.  (I know many people here have their parents pay for private school and activities, but that is not where I am going with this.  I really just want to know about summer and how we can best help our children, since our house is chaos right now.) [/quote]

PP you were responding to. What I mean is that most successful situations in life need extensive, long-term preparation, whether you are aware of preparing or not. 
So if you are interested in very popular camps, these fill up quickly in January (the month most summer camps open up their spots). This means winter is the season when working parents try to nail down their children's summer schedule, which in turn means the children, if consulted as they should be, will need to think ahead and then agree to go through with whatever activity they had chosen back in Jan/Feb. If your children have never had that kind of discipline of making long-term plans and following through, then of course they're baulking now, which means you'll have to teach them this skill (better late than never).
Likewise, if you are interested in getting your child into a good college in these ultra-competitive times, you have to discuss careers, and their academic trajectories to get there, well before junior year when they apply for college. Why? Because they will need a strategy to get where they want to go: starting in middle school, the courses they choose build on each other. Ex: if one of your kids wants to be a physicist, she will need to take the most advanced math courses her high school can offer, which means she will need to start the fast track in middle school. If your other kid wants to be a fashion designer, he will need to take all the art electives and build a private portfolio and win some fashion design competitions on the side. This is what I mean by charting a course. High school summer activities prove to college selection committees what students really want to do in their spare time, which is why it's best to make it dovetail with the subjects they want to pursue in college. Elementary school is for fun and experimenting with all kinds of cool camps and outings. Middle school is the time to iron out any academic issues and to start thinking about the bigger picture, while still having fun. High school, there's pretty much no leeway - everything is college-focused.
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