A Good Use of Summer for Boys

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

Every season is a good time for a boy to grow. This is especially true of summer. 

Summer differs from the academic year in two important ways: the amount of free time at a boy’s disposal and the baseline mental disposition he’s likely to bring to it—one of enjoyment, rather than hard work. Approached in the right way, these characteristics can actually work for the good of a boy’s growth. 

But failing to plan the summer well is more than a missed opportunity for growth. It risks backsliding. There is no such thing as moral stagnation; there is only growth or degeneration.

As a parent, you need to look for ways to help your son grow. I’d suggest setting goals across a few categories: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

Before getting into what kind of goals to set, two caveats are in order.

First, summers are great for family time. Time together should be prioritized. In our fast-paced, technologically-minded world, we have a tendency to think that personal growth works the way that building a machine does. In some ways, this is true. It helps to be deliberate and thoughtful about your son’s moral development. But formation is fundamentally relational, and it is important to create a family culture in which the boy desires to spend time with his parents and siblings.

As much as possible, parents should enjoy time with their children over the summer: more relaxed meals, pool time, watching movies and sports—the World Cup, say—playing board games. When boys do have activities outside the house, those activities should be purposeful and formative—not simply expensive babysitters.

Second, summer is the season for boys to be allowed to be boys. Schools often do not permit much freedom or healthy risk. Summer gives boys a natural chance to be themselves. Don’t fear downtime, or boredom, or roaming the neighborhood, or catching frogs—the things boys have done for generations. Having a job and staying busy is good too, of course. But our culture tends to fear downtime excessively, depriving boys of the chance to simply be themselves. Plus, as my friend Arthur Brooks explains, embracing boredom is a key ingredient to developing that contemplative disposition necessary to discovering the meaning of one’s life.  

A Few Suggestions for Goals

When it comes to helping your sons develop a gameplan for the summer, here are few tips: 

1. If your son is already in high school, let him come up with his own goals, with your guidance. He’ll own them—and so pursue them with more enthusiasm—and he’ll begin developing the habit of setting goals for himself.
2. Limit him to one goal per category below. He may not need a goal in every category.
3. Goals should be specific, measurable, and doable.

Physical: The purpose of physical goals is three-fold: develop habits that contribute to long-term bodily health, grow in the strength and toughness necessary to being a protector, and learn sports that can become enjoyable, life-long hobbies—ideally played with friends. This means he should be doing some form of exercise every day that develops his overall strength and conditioning. It is okay to be an expert in a single sport, but his expertise should not lead to imbalance; this is a recipe for injury. He should play sports for fun. He should consider what he eats and when. At times, he should even choose to forgo a snack or delay a drink of water. And he should set times for going to bed and getting up. 

Intellectual: Summer school work is good and necessary, as is SAT prep and college essays. Even more important is developing a habit of reading, enjoying a good book. The best reading plan, however, is seeing mom and dad read. 

Moral: Self-discipline is especially good ground for boys. The best battlegrounds are material order, personal hygiene, and punctuality. Also consider goals around family relationships: attentiveness and care for younger siblings. Service projects can be good. But they are good mainly if they help the boy return home with a disposition of service in ordinary family life—chores, playing with a younger sibling even if he does not feel like it, etc. 

Spiritual: The question to ask yourself as a parent is: What does my son need to do in order to own his faith more fully? Morning or evening prayers? Praying the rosary on his own? Getting to daily Mass during the week?

Finally, accountability: a boy should feel accountable to someone for the goals he sets. Goals work best when someone—most likely a parent—“reports” with him, helps him stay on track and adjust course along the way.