Tween-teen parents work to ward off summer boredom

NEW YORK — Kiley Krzyzek is going to be a counselor-in-training for a month this summer. She'll do choir camp for a week.

But it's the rest of the time the 14-year-old wants to fill up, the weeks when there is nothing going on.

"At first, it's a big relief to be off from school without extra work and stress," said Kiley, of West Hartford, Conn. "But then it gets to be too boring. You find yourself watching TV too much, on the computer too much."

Many parents of tweens and young teens are looking to beat summer boredom as the economy puts pricey specialty camps and residential camps out of reach. Residential camps cost anywhere from $325 to $1200 a week, according to the American Camp Association. And some day camps charge for counselor-in-training programs for young teens.

Since they are old enough to stay home, some parents who need to cut costs say enrolling their kids in programs for most of the summer is not an option.

Anne Wear, 42, of High Point, N.C., said she can only afford to send her almost 13-year-old daughter to day camp for five weeks; the rest of the summer she'll remain at home. Wear recently took a 20 percent pay cut and has two younger children, one will be going to day care, the other to camp.

"With my pay cut and the economy the way it is, we can't afford to do more than that," said Wear, who works in public relations.

Summer is tough for tweens and young teens, experts say. Kids in that 12-15 age range are old enough to stay home but too young to drive or get jobs other than things like baby-sitting and mowing lawns.

But while it can be easy and cheaper to leave kids home to entertain themselves when parents are working, too much unstructured time can lead to boredom, which is a constant complaint from tweens and young teens, said Denise Restauri, founder and CEO of AllyKatzz.com, a social networking site for girls ages 10 to 15.

Kids want to be active, said Restauri, and many are so overprogrammed they don't know what to do with free time.

That can turn into a lot of television watching, computer playing and texting.

Lee Ann Fleming, 46, of Centennial, Colo., who has a son turning 12 next week, said she found a local program this summer for kids ages 11 to 14, but can afford to send him only a couple of days a week.

Fleming works from home, so she can supervise somewhat, but there will be stretches where she will be working.