I'm back at work today. As usual, I'm kind of happy, kind of sad, kind of excited, kind of melancholy. Summer is the big pay-off time for us all; it's the time of the year when we truly appreciate the rewards of being teachers. We may not have much money; we may not be able to afford big vacations or new things for our house or expensive camps and schools for our kids, but we do have two months of pure family time each year and I wouldn't trade that for anything. But all that family time does make it very hard to say good-bye to the summer and almost painful to think about how in three short weeks everyone will be back at school and work and our lives will take off in the usual hectic, chaotic, often difficult ways that always usher in the new school year. Having two months together as a family also gives us invaluable time to help both kids prepare for the upcoming school year, and to prepare ourselves mentally for the challenges that a new school year always brings.
Most summers I head back to work feeling a little frustrated that we didn't accomplish as much as we wanted to with the summer family time--especially when it comes to working with L. on some recurring specific issues and the handful of new ones that always seem to crop up. But this summer we've been spending a lot of time preparing L. for the transition to middle school. With help from L.'s new therapist, we're working hard on a new positive behavior system (more on that later) and on establishing good routines for him now to help ease the transition. For the first time in a few summer, I feel we are finally making some headway and producing some positive changes to L.'s routine. Here's what we've (and by "we've" I'm including L. of course) accomplished so far:
--At the beginning of the summer L.'s screen time was out of control. He was spending 5-6 hours a day in front of the computer, doing games, reading websites, or watching TV through the internet. We designated the hours between 8:00 pm and 8:00 am as Power Down time, and reduced his time to 3-4 hours. While things weren't pretty when we first started this, I'm happy to report now that he only needs one reminder and he dutifully powers down his computer without a single complaint.
--In order to set the tone for good habits at the start of the school year we made it an inflexible rule that L. he had to come down for breakfast within an hour after waking up (he fell linto the bad habit at the beginning of the summer of not coming down to breakfast at all). He also has to eat at the dining room table--a major change for him. We're still riding out the extinction burst wave on this one, but it's been smooth these past few days, so I'm hoping we're over the worst part. He is also only allowed back on the computer for an hour after breakfast. This has further reduced his screen time to 3 hours and he has to pick from a "menu" of 2 or 3 physical activites before lunch.
--We've encouraged L. to make some specific strides in preparing himself for his new school. L. picked out the locker combination lock he wants to use in middle school and he has been practicing on it each day. Dealing with a combination lock is probably challenging for all new middle schoolers, but it will be even more stressful and challenging for L. We hope that giving him a chance to practice ahead of time will ease some of the stress. We also took L. to pick out new school clothes and we were so happily surprised when he picked regular pants with button fronts and zippers! It's been years since he's worn those types of pants, opting instead of track pants with elastic waists. We've been encouraging every aspect of this "fresh start" middle school will bring to him, and letting him take the lead in this.
A few weeks back I wrote about how difficult the extiniction burst process can be. I know now that we let some of L.'s habits get out of control because we were afraid of riding out the wave and living through how difficult things could be before they improved. Sometimes it's easier to just retain the status quo than it is to rock the boat through changes. Hard though it is to admit, it was easier many days to just leave L. sitting contentedly in front of the computer than it was to deal with the drama and upheaval and anger that resulted in prying him off of it. I definitely see our new resolve paying off this summer, especially when it comes to implementing some of these new routines and setting new limits. Hopefully we'll have enough structure in place when school starts so we can add new school-related routines into the mix without too much damage. The best part of all has been watching positive progress happen right before our eyes.