What They're Made Of
A Case For The Meaningful Summer
Every year, the familiar pre-summer panic sets in at our house, and, I’m certain, at the homes of most families I support. The school year ends, the calendar suddenly looks terrifyingly empty, and the question hangs in the air: What is my kid going to do this summer?
For families with a rising senior, the panic is understandable. There are applications to start, college lists to finalize and decision plans to determine. The summer is about completing résumés, and adding to them when necessary. But more often these days I’m hearing parents and students talking about making the summer count. I don’t disagree with those who are pondering this issue.
But I want to push back on that framing a bit, for all families, not only those of seniors. The most valuable thing a young person does with their summer doesn’t always equate with what looks most impressive. And students who understand that early, whether they be freshmen, sophomores, or juniors, usually arrive in senior year with something real to share, to write about.
The summer isn’t a checkbox. Think about it instead as a runway.
Somewhere along the way, “enrichment” became a code word for academic, expensive, and designed to be listed. A pre-college program. Tutoring intensives. Both worthy contributions, and an additional résumé line.
Sure, those things are important, I guess, but they’ve made us push aside something more fundamental and powerful: the potential of a summer as a stretch of unstructured time where our kids have the space and freedom to discover what it feels like to work, to serve, or to follow a curiosity all the way down numerous rabbit holes, to read even; and in the process perhaps become a little more of an adult than they were before summer began, in May.
That growth doesn’t show up on a transcript, and we won’t even know it’s there until years later, when we notice how a kid carries themselves in a room, or realize they can hold a conversation with someone twice their age. We’ll suddenly see that they’ve grown into really knowing that money is hard to earn and worth respecting. This growth doesn’t usually happen at an expensive pre-college summer camp. It happens more organically, through getting involved in the community, responding to a help wanted sign, and being out and about in the world.
The freeing part, I hope, about this piece I’m sharing is the confirmation that summer doesn’t have to be about résumé building or college at all. It can simply be the time when your kid embarks on a project, or digs into a passion or interest in a way they never imagined they would, without audience, application, fees or grades. Some of the most formative and memorable summers are the ones no one will ever read about.
Last summer, my son Henry worked for a contractor. This was not a program. There was no brochure, no certificate at the end. There was a truck, a job site, and a man who expected him to show up, watch, learn, and do the work.
Henry dug more than eighty holes into which fence posts would sit. Eighty. He learned the actual intricacies of building a fence: how it gets put together, why it matters that it’s level, what happens when you cut a corner. The hazards of working outside include being very sick with a tick-borne illness for a week, and basically missing out on our vacation in the Berkshires. He’ll be working for Pat again this summer. But that’s not the part I think is important, and it’s the point of why I bring this story up at all.
The part I think about is that Henry spent a summer answering to someone who wasn’t his parent, who didn’t care about his feelings the way we do, and who simply expected him to take a task and follow it through. He learned to interact with a person outside his own bubble. He learned that when you’re tired, you still have to keep digging. And he came home with the single most useful lesson a teenager can learn: it is genuinely hard to make a buck. No lecture from me could have taught him that. The shovel did.
My daughter Celia spent her summers working at camps when she was in middle school and in her first year of high school, with horses and kids. She didn’t do it for a line on an application, but because she loves horses, animals, and riding. By then I was a single mom without a budget for horseback riding lessons or leases for an aspiring equestrian. Working camps provided her with a way to spend her days immersed in a world she felt passionate about, one that I could no longer afford to give her.
Was it productive? Absolutely. She mucked stalls, managed anxious children and worked long, hot days. Was it enriching? She got to explore a passion in the most hands-on way imaginable, and she learned responsibility for creatures and kids who depended on her. Would it look good on a college application someday? Honestly, yes. But that’s the secret worth sitting with: it looks good precisely because she wasn’t doing it to look good. Admissions officers can sniff out the difference between a passion pursued and a box checked from a mile away.
Here’s the challenge to reframe why summer matters: the goal isn’t to find your child an impressive summer. It’s to find them a meaningful one, and to trust that meaning, over time, becomes impressive on its own.
So here’s my honest advice to all high school students who aren’t seniors focused on writing college application essays all summer. But heck, this applies to them, too. So here’s the assignment: do something meaningful. If it happens to look good on a college résumé, wonderful. But lead with love, not the résumé line. The rest will fall into place.
And yes, sometimes that means parents have to force the issue. Left to their own devices, most kids will happily spend eight weeks on a screen. Don’t be afraid to say: you have to do something this summer. Whether it’s working, volunteering, building, or caring for something, you have to do something that means something to you, tat you put your heart and soul into. I’ll help you find it, but you have to commit to it.
Here are a few starting points, for kids of any age:
Work a real job. Bag groceries, bus tables, mow lawns, join a contractor’s crew, babysit. The lesson isn’t the paycheck. It’s accountability.
Give back. Volunteer somewhere the need is real: a food bank, a shelter, a younger kids’ program, a respite center or senior center. Service teaches an empathy that classrooms can’t.
Chase a passion. Horses, coding, painting, fixing engines, gardening, growing tomatoes. Whatever lights you up, find the version of it that involves doing, not just consuming.
Make something and put it into the world. Write a series of songs and release an album on SoundCloud. Learn to DJ. Pick up the guitar. Sing. Do stand-up comedy. It takes real courage to finish a creative thing and share it with other people.
Learn a hard, hands-on skill. Learn to sail. Learn auto-mechanics. Learn to do electrical work. Take up carpentry. These pursuits can demand patience, repetition, and a willingness to be a beginner. That discomfort is the point.
Write and reflect. Keep a journal, start a blog, write letters, write poetry, keep a log of the summer. Reflection is how experience turns into wisdom instead of just being something that happens and is forgotten.
Start something entrepreneurial. A small business, a service, a project with real stakes: customers to answer to, a budget to manage, a problem to solve. Nothing teaches initiative like building something from nothing.
Build something. A fence. A garden. A small business. Then, in August, you’ll point to it and proudly say “I made that.”
The rising freshman who spends a summer volunteering at a food bank learns who she is and what matters to her long before anyone asks her to write about it. The sophomore who works a hard job learns the value of a dollar while he still has time to let the work shape him. The junior who follows a genuine passion ultimately builds a story for himself that no consultant could invent for him.
And the senior? The senior who spent the earlier summers this way isn’t scrambling to share about what they find meaningful. They already know it.
Summer matters more than students think, not because it’s some magical season to get ahead, but because it’s one of the few stretches of time when a young person gets to find out what they’re made of.
So the next time you find yourself at the start of summer and that question makes its way into your consciousness, ask it out loud. Ask it directly to your student, and give them the permission and encouragement to spend a summer doing something they’ve chosen that challenges them to grow, something meaningful and potentially transformative.
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