Battling summer boredom

"I'm bored. There's nothing to do."

How many times do you hear that from your kids during the summer?

Probably more often as summer moves along, says Kathy Peel. By now most of the lessons are over. The baseball season's winding down. Many family vacations have been taken. So, what is there to do?

Plenty, says Peel, mother of three grown sons, who is also known as the Family Manager, works as the family coach for America Online and has written 18 books, including "The Family Manager's Guide to Summer Survival" (Fair Winds Press, $14.95).

And what parents need to know, she said in a telephone chat from her home in Dallas, is that "you don't have to go and spend a lot of money to have great fun."

She worries that "we are raising a generation that thinks that to have fun you have to buy something or turn on the computer or TV. We live in a technological age, and I love it for the good things. But you need to set boundaries."

If kids spend their summer in front of the computer or TV, they will not develop creativity and resourcefulness, she said. "Those are important skills they are going to need later on."

When her boys were young, they used to play "cowboys and Indians. They'd make their own arrows and a quiver to put them in and turn acorns into stew and find stuff to wear. Now the only cowboys are online — and that's not as good. Looking at a screen is passive. You're not imagining what the characters look like. You're not developing the part of your mind that is able to look around and adapt. That's very important for kids. Creativity expands the mind and the imagination."

Summer is the perfect time for developing creativity and resourcefulness, she said. And it doesn't have to cost much.

For example, Peel suggested, "go to an appliance store and ask for some of their big boxes." Off the top of her head, she can give you more than 20 ideas of what to do with them, including creating a puppet theater, putting on a backyard carnival with the boxes as booths, making a castle, building a backyard obstacle course, covering its sides with murals, connecting boxes to make a playhouse or reading hideout, turning it into a submarine, creating a Western town, making a rocket ship.

Over the years, she's collected a lot of other ideas for creative play. "I used to be a mother who didn't 'do glue.' But when our three boys were young, I realized that if I wanted them to grow up to be creative and resourceful people, I'd better have plenty of ideas for fun, creative activities in my back pocket that could capture their imaginations and keep them happily occupied when they reached their specified TV limit for the day (which didn't take long)."