D has chosen things she enjoys for the past few summers. She did a two week performing arts camp and a 3 week language exchange program in Germany. She loved both of them and we have no regrets. They were both paid and not competitive. She is competitive enough at school and wanted off the train for the summer.
If she would’ve been dying to take a physics class or do two months of research and I couldn’t dissuade her, I would’ve supported her wholeheartedly. But it was never anything we pushed.
She has also worked as a camp counselor which was great experience.
In between, she slept and rested, read books and saw family. Seeing family–especially aging grandparents, is a priority.
The road trips to check out colleges were a lot of fun. Endless memories. Things we did to make them fun for kids & not drudgery:
Kids made a CD of their favorite music at the time, and this was played throughout trip. The One Direction years were tough.
Generous budget for college T-shirts.
We didn’t participate in formal presentations or tours. I had printed a campus map for each college before the trip.,.we showed up, walked around, chatted with a few people, perhaps bought a T-shirt, took a few photos, & moved on. No time to get bored, and length of stay was expanded or contracted based on how much we liked the school.
Never underestimate the value of in-car snacks.
Let kids pick where to eat (usually).
Get gas at those big truck stops. Kids loved roaming around & looking at all the weird stuff they sell.
My s’s are several years apart, so summer’s for one were different than the other, though both attended summer camps and academic enrichment programs, as well as working, babysitting, being camp counselors, etc. My favorite memory was when older s was a counselor at a sleep away camp. Many of the counselor’s were from overseas. The camp was about 3-4 hrs from our home, and he asked if he could bring some counselor’s back after camp to spend a few days with us. I said “sure - just let me know how many beds to have ready” and also stocked up on a lot of food. Well, when they arrived, cars just kept coming. There were 17 of them! But it was a boatload of fun!!
While kids were growing up, we usually went away the first 2 weeks of June, right after they were out of school. We traveled all over the world with them. Some of our best memories were renting a villa in Italy, eating, drinking, and watching sunset. There was one particular one where we were at an Italian seaside (think of Jersey shore), we watched a handful of older Italian men setting up beach chairs. They were using tape measures to be very precise where chairs had to be. The girls bought a lot of Italian beach trinkets, which we painstakingly hand carried home.
When D1 left home for college, she made a photo book of all the place we’ve been to.
Hiking & touring national parks, especially out west, because they are so beautiful. Family gatherings at the beach with cousins/aunnts/uncles in New England, CA & WA. Touring Boston, Seattle/Victoria, San Diego, LA, SF, & Hawaii, again usually with extended family. A few summer weeks/weekends at the beach in VA, NC, MD are still talked about too, especially the ones when we went with friends and not just our own small family.
My kids basically enjoyed doing anything new & fun, away from home and the normal routine. We almost always combined our summer vacations with visiting family, because our family is very spread out and we have limited travel funds. We tried to do one trip each summer.
I agree with OP that most students who care about their academics & ECs work really hard during the school year. We all needed the summers to de-stress. My kids did do a few camps, academic programs, & PT jobs during the summers too, but I think that the most memorable activities for them were the special vacations or weekends away with family & friends.
The years went by so fast. I wish we had had more $ to do trips with our kids. Now, while paying the big bucks for tuition, we are basically limited to visits to campus and grandparents.
For gifted kids the best times are had with other kids they can relate to. This includes the academics they enjoy. Some highlights include the two (different years) weekend parties held by another gifted kid who had been at the three week summer camp where a bunch of kids from around the state spent time together. btw- these kids do not work really hard during the school year and in fact are usually bored with even the most rigorous classes in HS. Computer learning was not what it is now, so much more available now than ten years ago.
I have more bad than good memories of son as a teen, unfortunately. The time he refused to get out of the car at the national park north of San Francisco while we went to see the trees- he wasn’t the only teen I saw in a parked car.
Sending off to those daytime local activities seems to be the usual for us throughout his childhood. Nothing exceptional. As a teen he spent his time without us generally- kept up his CC running with friends, went away to be with intellectual peers, holed up in his room. Given our experiences with him on our last major trip (see above) we did not plan any more. Mundane summers. We had done traveling often when he was younger so he had been places, done things with parents.
A runners camp held on the flagship U campus (great place!!!) was another highlight for son as a HS student.
It makes a difference in the family lifestyle and the number of kids. Harder with an only child who has no one to play with on trips- not as much fun in hotel pools… Personalities also matter. Some are more enthused with a good book than going places- our son never had a sense of where we were because he was engrossed in a book on car trips to see relatives or any out of town activity and never looked to see landmarks.
H’s relatives, on the other hand, have been to so many more foreign places with their two kids. Wanderlust. Some day we’ll have to ask which trip was most memorable. Also- discovered last year that not all of those trips were wonderful- there were family tensions et al (did not want/need details).
As a kid my family never went anywhere or did anything- we survived is all I can say about it. father’s vacation meant house/yard chores, sigh And, of course, mothers did NOT work back in my childhood era.
For my high school senior son, the most memorable summer experiences have been mostly through music camps (Indiana University Summer String Academy, Heifetz Int. Music Institute, Aspen Music Festival, etc.) and his youth symphony music tour of Carnegie Hall, various cities in Japan, Czech Republic and Germany. The rest of summer has been spent on family camping trips, especially in locations that have hot springs for rejuvenating powers, and ACT/SAT preps.
Three trips stand out in particular - Mexico (Mexico City, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido), Argentina (Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Iguazu) and Europe (Paris, Rome)
The kids were old enough to appreciate the sights, the trips were easy – all logistics easily arranged, everything “worked” – and we all truly enjoyed everything we did and saw.
My daughter also fondly remembers a week-long Sierra Club backpacking trip she did in Yosemite when she was 14. It confirmed her for life as a backpacker, and lover of the Sierras (even though she grew up in the Rocky Mountains.) Son did a similar program in Rocky Mountain National Park and also loved it. But these weren’t “family” trips - this was their own, very valuable, experience.
D1 had gone to Concordia Village language camps for years, and loved being a credit villager for a couple years, and then spending a summer abroad in a part of the world where the language is spoken. D2 liked a Y camp that ran long canoe trips in the Boundary Waters in MN, and also chose and loved the Davidson THINK program in Nevada for two summers.
When I was a kid we rented a house on a local lake for a month in the summer. My dad could drive to work in town. Those were the best summers in my memory. Lazy days swimming, walking down soft sand roads barefoot to pick berries or catch bugs, reading on the porch.
You all have boatload of fond memories and I assume your kids did fine college admission-wise as well. Obviously the music-related activities require music talent and world travel needs financial backing, but other than that lot of activities are doable.
I’m curious if at certain age, even in a short period, kids are more likely to bond with friends, like @jym626 's son and @runswimyoga 's son. Is that 9th or 10th grade? If so, that time has to be fun-filled. I’ll see what other parents have to say about that.
Decades have past and memories get sweeter for us parents. Your fond memories remind me of mine. I thought I didn’t have any. I do. I didn’t do summer academics and I don’t think they’d help much if I did.
I am not sure what you are asking, @eiholi. DS#1 was good friends with someone from a summer enrichment program (maybe 10 or 11th? I don’t recall which year). That friend happened to attend his same undergrad college, and they have remained good friends to this day. The pile of 17 friends who arrived on our doorstep occurred the summer after his freshman year of college (he was a counselor).
My son and I did a lot of traveling for college football games when he was young. That includes a couple of national championship games in football, baseball and basketball. When I walked into his school on Friday’s they would just ask where we were going that week. We also went on a lot of trips out to the San Francisco area during the summer. What great trips.
Sounds like the parties I mentioned for the kids from the WCATY gifted camps. But those were prearranged.
Wonder if introverted kids (and parents) tend to acquire friends as easily as the extroverted majority? My H and son, even without attitudes, would rather sit with a book than do more active things in general as well.
We have 7 kids and in the summer we mostly just hang out at the neighborhood pool, do crossword puzzles, pick berries, go to the library, watch TV/movies, and visit relatives. All those ordinary things are memorable! 3 of my kids are still at home, but all of them have been in and out of the house this summer. One special project was raising a baby robin–it took a month and a lot of research to raise it from an injured nestling to occasional visitor. (I learned a lot about birds in general and robins in particular!) Another project–that extended over 2 summers–was collecting and recycling over 10,000 golf balls from an abandoned golf course. Happy memories of seeing my kids enjoying a beach on lake Michigan. Or fishing, catching frogs, and playing in boats in the pond at their cousins’ house.
We travelled quite a bit in the years our kids were in middle and high school. All of those trips were great, some were really great. But quite honestly what I & the wife miss the most is the regular old summer nights coaching or watching baseball/softball games, and then heading out to a favorite hole in the wall near our house for burgers and ice cream afterwards.
FWIW, neither of our kids did any summer structured academic stuff at all. They were too busy doing other things whether that was sports, theater, working or just hanging out on the boat or with their friends. Life is and always has been more than a math test.
Fond memories differ between parents and kids. Posts here made me wonder if the most memorable ones for kids occur at certain ages. If so, selection of activities has significance, e.g., like minded gatherings around grade 10 summer for boys?
The kids and I had a great time traveling for a number of summers. We camped all over the place, took Amtrak acros the country a number of times Amtrack has, or had half price tickets for kids. That down time on the train together was wonderful. We had regular camping trips with groups of friends here in state. The kids would play, parents would talk and cook together. It was a great time for all of us. They would endlessly play- active outdoor games, we’d hike and explore together.
My girls eventually became enamored of Concordia Language Villages, and begged to attend. I then spent all my summer vacations working there for the tuition reduction. I still love the place, and work occasionally. S worked there one summer, but otherwise was more with his dad. However, he became so enamored of Spanish thru working that his initiative for studying Spanish in school was markedly improved and he later became fluent. I go back and forth on the wisdom of spending all that time at the camps rather than traveling with the kids. However, it gave one of mine a career in languages, so not all bad.
DD graduated from college last May. I think she would say her most memorable summers were the ones she traveled overseas with her choir, particularly the one where they participated in the Lalupidu Song Festival in Estonia and sang on a stage with 25,000 others in front of 80 - 100,000 Estonians. Choir was part of her/our life since the second grade, and she stuck with it, although she quit the flagship internationally performing choir after ninth grade since it was so time consuming. She sang with kids who went on to be various music/musical performance majors, and will never be at that level. She did, however, get a small music scholarship at her LAC which doesn’t specialize in music.
we had so many great road trips when the kids were all young HS & younger. Recently, things have been so busy in the summers with swim team, band camps, kids work etc that we havent done much and i feel like my youngest has gotten “the shaft.” This upcoming summer there will be no band camp - so a full two weeks in july will now be open for going to where the kids want to go the most – the beach. Now it’s just a decision of which coast?
Hoping to have a great upcoming summer!