Designing Your Summer
It’s coming down to the end of the school year in my neck of the woods and parents and students are feeling buried by all of the final performances, projects, exams, and events. So today I’m writing about how to bring mindfulness to the summer months by intentionally designing the summer you want to have. If you’ve got school-aged children, you may already have their childcare and activities scheduled or you may not have even thought about it. Or you may not have any children in your house at all. Whatever your situation, I hope you will find some of these ideas and tips useful as you think through what you want your summer to look like.
Why Design Your Summer?
To begin, I’m stealing the language of “designing your summer” directly from Gretchen Rubin, a researcher and writer in the areas of happiness, habits, and human nature. She has written several books on these topics and also has an excellent podcast called Happier that she does with her sister, Elizabeth.
When I hear the phrase “designing your summer” what comes to mind is mindfulness and intentionality. It is easy to let the 8-10 weeks of summer go by without much thought or planning when really, it is prime time for making memories and increasing overall happiness. So that is why I’m suggesting that you take a few minutes to consider how you can best use this season to move toward a fuller life for yourself and your family.
Identify Your Summer Values
The first step to designing your summer is to identify what your priorities and values are for this season. These do not have to be lofty ambitions. Your summer values can be as simple as Relaxation, Connection, or Fun. This can be great to do with the entire family, depending on the ages of your children, and agree to some shared summer values that everyone can get behind. The 2-3 values you identify can be used as a litmus test when you’re deciding how you want to allocate your time this summer. It’s kind of like knowing whether you want to make a cake or a meatloaf. If you don’t know what sort of end product you want, there’s no way to know what kinds of ingredients you might need to get you there.
Incidentally, I plan on writing much more about values-based living in future posts because I think it’s a foundation for mental health, self-care, boundaries, and creating a life worth living for yourself. For now, let’s move on to the ingredients of the summer you want to design.
Daily Habits and Routines
One of the big things that often goes by the wayside during the summer is our daily routines, schedules, and habits. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is something to look at mindfully and make conscious decisions about. The beautiful thing is that you generally get to choose what you want these to look like within the bounds of what has to get done or is already scheduled (work, appointments, kids’ activities, etc.) So, this is where knowing your top summer values is helpful. A person or family who has chosen to focus on rest and relaxation this summer will likely have very different habits and routines from someone who has chosen travel or excitement.
For children, having some kind of dependable schedule or routine is important to maintain through the summer. Again, it can look different from the school year – later bedtime, more screen time, more time with friends, more casual or self-serve meals, taking evening walks, etc. But children and teens really do thrive when they know what to expect at certain points to provide structure to their days.
So, decide ahead of time, in accordance with the values you and your family have identified, where the boundaries are. Again, the older the children, the more able they will be to participate in this conversation. When a teenager has identified that their top summer value is adventure, for example, you can remind them of this as an explanation for why you want to work with them to set a limit on video games or watching YouTube.
Choosing Special Activities or Events
Summer is often a time of special outings, travel, activities, and events. If your community is anything like mine, you can go to a different festival every weekend if you want to! There are concerts, community theater, outdoor movies, events at the library, camps, farmer’s markets, pools, etc, etc, etc. Basically, you and your kids can be as busy as you want to be and spend as much money as you want to spend on various activities. Here again, I suggest that you use your identified values to decide which and how many of these opportunities you want to take advantage of. Being secure in the knowledge that you’re living out your values can also prevent the FOMO (fear of missing out) that can crop up when you see or hear your friends or your kids’ friends spending their time differently from you.
I hope you find this helpful! I’d love to hear what values speak to you for this season. You can let me know in the comments below or on my posts on facebook or Instagram!
Until next time, take good care of yourself!
Meghan