By Shari Shapiro
Before the school year fully slips away, I want to say something to a group of people who rarely hear it.
To the school counselors, the social workers, the guidance staff in every one of our schools, and to our own TeenTalk counselors in those buildings every day: thank you. Most of what you do can’t easily be seen but it is felt. There’s no record of the student you pulled aside before a bad morning became a bad week. No note home about the kid who ate lunch in your office because the cafeteria was too much that day. The work that matters most is usually the crisis that never happened, and a whole year of it just came to a close.
Which brings me to the thing I’ve been thinking about as the buildings get quieter.
You can usually tell the rhythm of the year. There’s a certain sound to a weekday morning, even a rushed one. A cartoon in the background, a daughter running downstairs hunting for a shoe, the bus you can hear two streets over. You’ve already been up the stairs twice to get your son out of bed and you’re about to go a third time. You don’t think of it as anything until you’ve done it 180 mornings straight, and then one day in June it’s just gone.
School runs on that same rhythm, all day long. They know when to be up, what room to sit in, when lunch is. They don’t think about it, they’re just in it. And a kid who knows what the day holds doesn’t have as much to worry about.
And then, in a single week in June, the rhythm stops.
And summer’s supposed to be the good part. A lot of the time it is. But you know how it goes by July. The kid who’s up too late and sleeping till noon, snappish at the breakfast that’s now lunch, hanging around the house not quite knowing what to do with themselves. You find yourself wondering where that smiling kid from May went.
Usually nothing happened. The rhythm broke, and nothing came in to take its place.
The good thing is you don’t have to rebuild school at the kitchen table. You just have to give the summer a little rhythm of its own. A few anchors will carry you further than any schedule taped to the fridge.
Pick a time everybody in the house more or less gets up by, and hold it loosely. It doesn’t need to be early. A kid who gets going around the same time each day will settle in better than one who doesn’t. And eat a meal together whenever you can. You learn more about how a kid is really doing by passing the butter across the table than you ever will by asking how they’re feeling.
Put one or two things on the calendar every week that they can count on. Tuesdays at the pool, or pizza every Friday, anything they can look forward to. Kids will start asking on Wednesday if it’s pool day yet, and that asking is the whole point.
And get the phone out of the bedroom at night if you can manage it. Nothing good happens on that thing at midnight, and a kid running on four hours of sleep is a different kid the next afternoon. You won’t win it every time. Trust me, this one is worth the fight anyway.
You don’t have to fix anything. You’re not their counselor, and you don’t need to be. You just have to be there, more or less the same every day. Kids can handle a lot when they know someone they love will be standing in the kitchen in the morning.
Some summers, a kid needs more than a good routine, and you can feel it without having the first idea what to do about it. That’s what we’re here for. Kids In Crisis runs a helpline that’s open around the clock, all summer, for exactly those moments when you can’t tell if what you’re seeing is an ordinary rough patch or something more. You don’t need an emergency to call. You can reach us anytime at 203-661-1911, by phone or text, and our TeenTalk counselors don’t disappear just because the buildings are quieter.
The counselors I started this letter thanking spend all year being that steady presence for our kids. Summer is just the season when the rest of us get to take a turn.
