From Deseret News archives:
Battling summer boredom
Creative suggestions, at little cost, keep children occupied
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."
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.
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