High-School Summers

Many teenagers have magical experiences during the summer (not every summer, but usually during at least one in their adolescent years). These are the times when they make leaps forward in creativity, emotional maturity, and responsibility. Typically, these magical experiences revolve around a unique opportunity or activity: an art or drama camp away from home, working as a counselor at a camp, a full-time job that comes with real responsibility. In short, experiences that open their eyes to some aspects of themselves to which they were previously blind. It is surprising, though only at first glance, that these discoveries almost never happen with your teenager's regular group of school buddies. Typically it's when our teenagers are around kids they have never met before or have never had substantive interaction with that these self-discoveries occur. It takes just a bit of backtracking to understand why this is so. But once you understand why these enchanted experiences happen this way, you'll have another subtle way to connect with your teenager.

Friends in school develop almost rigid expectations of one another and of themselves. They have a solid and known identity within the group, which is part of what provides security within the group of friends. They know how to behave with each other and know what to expect from one another. During seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, especially, this type of consistent security is paramount. But in tenth and eleventh grades, what was earlier felt as security is now experienced as constraining and confining. Here is what one tenth-grade girl has to say about this:

It's like I'm changing in all sorts of cool ways, but my friends aren't changing at all. So when I'm around them, I feel fake, that I'm just pretending to be the way I used to be to fit in. And it's not that I don't like them, it's just that I'm bored when I'm around them—bored with them and bored with myself.

Of course, the huge irony here is that when one teenager in the group begins to think this way, it's often a sign that others are having similar thoughts or are on the verge of similar feelings—though they seldom voice them to one another for fear of hurting someone's feelings. And when they do, it's almost always in one-on-one settings, away from the group, which frees them up with one another but not with the group. Group think is powerful during the first part of high school—and even more powerful in middle school. This is why many friendship groups splinter and reconfigure—minus one or two old faces and a few new faces added—during the end of tenth grade and the beginning of eleventh grade. It's normal.

What this means for your teenager is that with his friends in school it is difficult for him to change or grow in substantive and surprising ways without sacrificing the security of those friendships and his ongoing identity within the group. This is why most teenagers who have magical experiences during the summer, and feel that they change profoundly as a result, often have a difficult time bringing these changes back to school with them. Their friends don't recognize the changes because they don't fit with their preexisting notions of who your teenager is. This means that your teenager has to find new friends (to maintain the changes), delay the changes (to maintain the security from these friendships), or figure out a way to do a little of both.

I spent six weeks of the summer away from home, working at a summer camp as a counselor with little kids. It was the best summer ever. I discovered that I'm really good at it, even to the point of realizing that I want to be a teacher after I go to college—something I had never suspected before this summer. Just seeing how their little minds work was a real turn on for me. By the end of the summer, I had a lot of responsibility and the kids came to count on me.

When camp ended, some of them didn't want to leave and they kept hugging me around the waist and telling me that they loved me. They made me cry. So now I've got fifteen kids I promised to stay in touch with over the school year.

But the hard part is that because I changed so much over the summer, school and my friends just aren't the same anymore. I used to live for parties and the whole high school social scene, but now it just feels kind of lame. You know, been there, done that kind of thing. But my friends are still totally into it and just roll their eyes whenever I bring up the summer and what it did for me.

I feel like I'm living two lives now. In one, I'm going through the motions of finishing high school, going to parties, playing soccer, doing my schoolwork, and all that stuff. But my heart's not really in it. In my other life, I'm planning activities for camp next summer, staying in contact with some of the campers and other counselors, researching colleges that have good education programs, and volunteering two afternoons a week at the local YMCA—coaching a little kids' soccer team. It's not what I expected of senior year, but it's the best I can do right now.

You now have a wide open opportunity to connect with the part of your teenager that went through major changes during the summer, the part of him that his friends aren't connecting with. There are lots of ways to do this. You can acknowledge how it is difficult to go through change away from friends and then to integrate those changes into the old friendships. Often an example from your life opens the door for them.

Sophomore year in college I spent the second semester studying in Spain. Far and away it was the best semester of college. But it made for a tough junior year because none of my friends could relate to all that I had gone through. It took a while, and I admit I was lucky, but I managed to keep my old friends and to make some new ones who were more in line with some of the changes I had undergone while studying in Spain. But for a while there, a couple of months, in fact, I was pretty depressed and definitely lonelier than I had ever been before in my life.

You can go out of your way to bring up his summer experience at different times in the year. It's a way for him to reflect on the summer and a way for him to realize that you recognize the changes he has gone through. Sometimes, you do this directly: Have you thought anymore about some of the insights you had this summer? You know about teaching after you finish college. And, How is it volunteering at the YMCA compared to working as a counselor at summer camp?

At other times you work behind the scenes to create coincidences: I was just clearing out the "Favorites" file on my Web browser and noticed that your camp put up a bunch of new photos on its Web site. Want to take a look?

And at yet other times, you feed this emergent part of your teenager by pointing out various articles or television specials: Did you see that article I left on your desk about that summer program that hires high school students to teach elementary and middle school students over the summer? Seems like an incredible place.

The point is that although his friends may ignore the changes he went through, you don't. Instead, you come back to the changes that have occurred, not every day, but at least once or twice a month. This validates the changes and tells your teenager that you've noticed, which matters more to him than he can ever tell you.

It's weird, but since I did summer theatre this summer, my mom and I are closer than ever. My friends don't get what it was about, but my mom does. Turns out that she loved acting when she was in high school and college—she even thought about moving to New York to act—until she met my dad, that is. Turns out I can talk with her more about this than with my friends, who haven't acted. Kind of strange, but nice, too.