<p>Just got an email from my son (away overseas for 5 weeks) apropos of nothing, about how he is “very hesitant” to spend a week with us at our house upstate at the end of next month as planned. He has spent exactly one week there over last Xmas vacation and no time since. We understand that he thinks it is boring, etc. and have invited him to ask any friends to come stay, but he hasn’t taken us up on our offer.</p>
<p>Does anyone else have a comparable situation? H & I find it sad that we so seldom get to spend time at this place we both love. We hesitate to go alone and leave S at home by himself, having heard numerous horror stories of kids home alone and 50 friends who just “drop by” having heard through the grapevine that the parents are out of town. I am tired of these battles, and the truth is that even if he spends the week up there with us, he will still have over 4 weeks in the city before school starts to hang out with his friends. Part of me wants to insist he accompany us; the other part says it’s not worth the grief and we should just wait another year until he is away at college (hopefully!) when we will have more freedom.</p>
<p>Why don’t you and H go stay at the vacation house while your S is still overseas? That way you get to stay at the house you love and your S won’t feel (or be) compelled to be there and you won’t have the S at home alone scenario. I understand you want your S there but after being overseas for 5 weeks he probably wants to just be in his own environment with his friends.</p>
<p>yes, we have in fact been spending a lot of time upstate at the house while S is gone… I guess I was just harboring the fantasy that the 3 of us could spend a pleasant week up there together.</p>
<p>Sigh. I think I should probably just give it up.</p>
<p>thing I learned from the rich kids I went to HS with, they only want to go on vacation with parents if their home is on a beach or a ski hill and near a good town. If I’m ever rich that’s what I’ll focus on.</p>
<p>We gave up the weeklong vacations with teens about 4 years ago.
Our alternative now: we’re going on a European vacation after the kids go to college in September. Just the two of us.
They like nothing better on their time off than to hang out at home. Our house is on the east coast of Florida, although there’s really nothing to do in our town other than water sports.</p>
<p>I guess my family is unusual, but we love family vacations. We don’t have a single spot we always go to, and we all love to travel to new places. At the end of the summer we’re going to Venice and Croatia for close to two weeks. My parents recently built a house in a very boring town in Florida; we’ve only been there once as a family so far, but everyone would be happy to go again next year sometime.</p>
<p>My take is that if your son is in high school, he should go with you, but if he is in college, he should have the choice. If your planned vacation is right after he returns from overseas, he may just feel tired and worn out. He may want some quiet time at home and a chance to see his friends. </p>
<p>Is he your only child? I’ve gone on short trips alone with my parents before, and it’s an entirely different experience than when my sister, who is close in age, comes along. If it’s just me and my parents, I get bored, get frustrated, etc. If my sister is there too we have a lot more fun.</p>
<p>^^^ yes, he’s an only child, a rising senior in high school. We have recently had some enjoyable vacations elsewhere (the 3 of us), but he repeatedly puts up a fuss about very occasionally accompanying us to our vacation home. He will be back home for 2 weeks before we were planning to go away. The truth is that I very much doubt whether his friends will even be home during that time. I am just not sure whether I have the energy to insist that he come.</p>
<p>I have found that it isn’t very enjoyable to take a teenage kid on a <em>forced</em> vacation that he doesn’t want to be on. </p>
<p>I’d rather enjoy myself (and my husband) without him rather than watch him pout, complain of boredom, or whatever else he can conjure up to do to make us feel his misery.</p>
<p>It’s a sad truth. Sort of like “breaking up” with your kid, I guess. </p>
<p>If it’s any consolation, he’ll be back in spades later on with his wife and kids. So hold onto that house. Hope there’s a lot of bedrooms.</p>
<p>My rising senior S has no desire to accompany us anyhwere (except a restaurant if we’re paying). Next week he is going with a friend to the beach for a long weekend so H and I have planned to go to a different beach (where S would be bored to death) during the same time. </p>
<p>We have not been on a family vacation since 2004 unless you count the obligatory 7 hour (one way) car trip to see the grandparents each Christmas which really puts the Merry in Christmas let me tellya.
I agree with Doubleplay. If they are going to be miserable and make me miserable I’d just as soon stay home.</p>
<p>I would under no circumstances leave a HS at home alone with parents hours away for a week…</p>
<p>I would not drive him anywhere during that week you planned on going away, he is on his own as far as transportation, no money, nada, its not punishment, it is reality, I would almost cancel the cable</p>
<p>This attitude that spending time with family, this poutiness, this rudeness- why? </p>
<p>It is so ungrateful, and I frankly am appalled that kids would act that way, and it seems these are darn lucky kids and have been allowed to treat their parents with disdain, sound harsh, but come on…how many stupid shows, recitals, sporting events in the rain, waiting outside of movie theaters at 11oclock, carpooling in our lives did we give, and the children can’t give a bit of time to mom and dad? did they really think sitting through 2 hours of a talent show to see 2 minutes of our own kid was our idea of a really great time…or when they were running late and we waited patiently…I loved doing all that for my Ds, and I would hope that they would like us enough to want to spend time with us…of course its a balance, but as young adults I would expect and how for a bit more maturity from a senior in HS than to have an attitude for a week, and see, the pointing and whining and immaturity worked…once again mom and dad gave up for the “child”</p>
<p>its like they are having controlled tantrums at 16, and that it is acceptable, would you have given to a toddler like that, but will to a snotty teen?</p>
<p>momoschki,
We’re going through a similar scenario here. We have two kids overseas, but only one will be coming home for a few weeks before school starts, and the other one will be going back to nyc. It’s a big adjustment when the kids go away, and then when they come home, it’s another adjustment, and it’s normal for them to want to just see their friends and chill for awhile. We would like to be able to take a family vacation - just the three of us - we all get along, and it would be nice to have some family bonding time. I think that it is a possibility, and I’ve offered some various options of places to go that wouldn’t take up so much time that she wouldn’t be able to also visit with her friends (some of whom are going abroad for a semester, and she will not be able to see them for that length of time). Boys might be different than girls on this one, but mostly I think it depends on the person - our son, for instance, wouldn’t even consider going with us - and he moves too fast anyway, so we couldn’t even keep up with him.</p>
<p>I understand the need of people to see their friends and totally respect that, however, to act all morose because they can’t spend every second with them is immature, and I would hope that we would expect better of our kids</p>
<p>There is a happy medium, but seems more often parents cave because they don’t want to deal with the bratty behavior</p>
<p>momoschki,
I have older kids (one is already a college grad and working doing his own thing), but I sincerely hear where you’re coming from. I wish you all the best in working it out.</p>
<p>most of the time an offspring is away from home missing friends because they are in some sort of amazing program, or traveling with a group, having an incredible time, something they chose to do…and yes they are away from their friends, but also their family who very likely gave up something for the adventure, and what the kid can’t give up a bit of free time themselves to be with family</p>
<p>“Wanting to be with friends” may be the polite way of expressing “There are reasons why I am not happy when I’m with my family.”</p>
<p>The moment my son moved to an off-campus apartment with a 12-month lease, he basically disappeared from our lives (except when he needs a root canal or something like that – he’s only an hour away from home, so he still sees his hometown doctors and dentist). </p>
<p>This has nothing to do with friends. He has only two friends from high school that he still sees, and one of those two is on the same campus that he is. And it has nothing to do with college friends, either. None of them are on campus this summer (where my son is working full-time on a research project), but that hasn’t motivated him to come home.</p>
<p>So why does he stay away? Several reasons: 1) his father and sister can’t stand the sight of each other, creating an atmosphere in our home that is oppressive, to say the least; 2) his father places severe restrictions on how late he can stay out if he is at home; and 3) the air conditioning works a lot better in his off-campus apartment than in our house. </p>
<p>So when your kid says that he doesn’t want to be with his family because he’d rather be with his friends, please consider the possibility that there are other reasons why he doesn’t want to be with his family, and that he’s just being tactful.</p>
<p>I think our family vacations are popular because we do them with our extended family and go to fun locations. We have 10 cousins, ages 22 - 12, who generally get along well together. Until this thread, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we haven’t done a vacation with just the five people in our immediate family for several years.</p>
<p>Momoschki, Is there any chance that there is another family that you are close to (related or not) that would want to join you at your vacation home? They could perhaps rent a nearby place. When I was a teenager, I too stopped enjoying family vacations. Even though I loved my folks, the idea of hanging out with them for a whole week was unappealing.</p>
<p>After our last vacation, it was the kids who were talking about what to do, where to go next year! Having more people really does change the dynamics.</p>
<p>I agree. We take an extended family vacation every year (and have a similar range in age of cousins as Kathiep), which makes it fun for all the kids. The longest trip we have taken with just our immediate family, in the last year, was four days, and that was about a day too long. Long weekends work fine…</p>
<p>I don’t think it is abnormal for teens not to want to spend extended amounts of time with their families, as long as they are pleasant and so forth when they are around. It’s developmentally appropriate to want to separate at this time.</p>
<p>So, I concur with the “adding more people” mantra. For an only child, in particular, a week with the parents may seem really long, and a friend, cousins, etc. might bring back the spark.</p>