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Community Corner

What To Do On Our Summer Vacation

Should we keep our kids' social calendar jam-packed or stop and smell the roses?

When I first had my daughter, I swore that I wasn’t going to be one of those overscheduling parents who was constantly chauffeuring her from ballet to soccer to piano lessons to play dates. 

Don’t ask me why I remember this, but around that time I saw Goldie Hawn on Larry King lamenting the lack of free time that kids have these days. I’m paraphrasing, because shockingly I can’t find the interview on YouTube, but she said something about how kids should be allowed to just lie out in a meadow watching the breeze blow through blades of grass. 

A couple of years later, my daughter was diagnosed with autism and I grudgingly had to give up on taking parenting advice from Goldie Hawn. That whole lying-in-the-meadow thing just doesn’t fly with autistic kids. They either wouldn’t last a minute due to intense sensory discomfort with the grass, or they’d start eating the grass. Or they might stare at the fluttering foliage for hours on end to the exclusion of everything else. Or, as would probably be the case with my daughter, they’d just pull out the Nintendo DSi that they’d stashed in the picnic basket.

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So what to do with a whole summer stretching out before us? During her preschool years, I signed my daughter up for camps through SEASPAR, the special needs parks and recreation organization. SEASPAR is an awesome organization that provides all of the supports that each child requires.  The staff is trained and experienced in special needs, and when I dropped her off every day I knew that she was in good hands. She loved it, and seemed to sense that she was in her element and amongst her own, so to speak. 

But special needs parents are frequently advised to expose their children to typically developing peers so that they can model their play skills and behaviors.  So, for the past couple of summers, I sent my daughter to a “regular” camp, with one of her therapists along as an aid. There she was able to model such typical behaviors as whining about the heat, mocking camp counselors and knocking kids unconscious with dodge balls.

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She didn’t making any lasting friendships. Or even any fleeting friendships. She didn’t seem to enjoy it very much, and by the end of it was even protesting having to go. At some point you have analyze your motivations and what exactly you are hoping to achieve and weigh it against your child's wishes. At least I think that's WGWD (What Goldie Would Do).

This year, I’ve come full circle and am considering a low-key, “stop and smell the roses” kind of summer. If watching blades of grass is meant to represent a soothing, stress-free way to while away a summer day without having to worry about running to the next appointment on the schedule, then we should be able to find a version of this for my daughter. 

Hers might look a little different to you. She might be standing poolside flapping her arms wildly as she watches the big splash that the other kids make when they jump off the high dive, or trying to cop a lick off of your ice cream cone outside of Every Day’s a Sundae, or running around in circles in Fishel Park during one of the summer concerts.

But, hey, she’s on vacation.

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