While summer break for many of us means scanning travel deals for trips abroad and eagerly anticipating ahead of the upcoming family vacations, there are boys and girls out there for whom summer break is a nightmare.
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Some children are constantly on playdates, sending GIFs on WhatsApp and waiting for their ride to another birthday party or fun group activity. However, other children experience summer break as a lonely and dark time.
This week, a pained mother approached me and shared what her seventh-grade child is going through. She told me he spent all break last summer by himself. No friends bothered to reach out to him, and his phone remained dormant. Apart from the class WhatsApp group, he was excluded from all the other groups his friends created.
According to her, a group of students who have always made his life difficult continued to do so in middle school. She and her husband thought that moving up a grade would be a new start for him, but to their disappointment and frustration, this group managed to tarnish his name in middle school as well. When a few kids planned to go out to a movie, a bike trip or a soccer game - he either had no clue about it or only heard about it after the fact.
When she spoke to me, it was important for her to clarify that she doesn't actually think these children are inherently bad, but rather that they simply have no idea how much their actions hurt her child. I asked her if she had approached their parents. "Of course," she replied, "but some were too busy, and some thought they had no real way to influence their older children." As one mother told her, "They're not five-year-olds, what can we really say to them?"
It seems that we have grown accustomed to seeing headlines every once in a while about children who have been excluded or bullied, but what we still don't know is does anyone really care?
What are the chances that the parents whose child is doing well socially will open their hearts and dedicate a few moments of kindness to another child who is struggling? Maybe now is precisely the time that every parent needs to ask themselves - What kind of children do I want to raise? Compassionate? Considerate? With a big heart? Or children who are only interested in superficial things?
And let's be honest, this life lesson will be one of the most important ones you teach your children.
Although I don't always succeed in keeping up with it, I have an annual ritual: I try to send a short WhatsApp message to all my students after summer break begins and write, "Hey, just checking that everything is going well with friends during the break." That's it. No more than that. Sometimes all it takes is approaching your children and asking them, "Do you have friends who have no one to spend the break with?"
Now is the time to be thoughtful and open your heart. It's time to strengthen the values of goodness within your children and show them that friends are much more important than any vacation. Spend time feeling what they feel, accepting and understanding them. These are the things that make us decent human beings.