Adventures in Vacation Parenting

You’d think if anyone could deal with a vacationing eleven year old, it would be me.
We middle school special ed teachers, after all, pretty much get it all. This year I had a kid whose nervous system slowly, inexorably deteriorated all year long; by March, I watched urine dripping down from her wheelchair, her eyes full of tears, in the middle of language class. Another student rarely bathed, got the glasses he needed only after the community facilitator supervised his exam and drove to the optician to pick them up, and had twenty absences in the spring semester – and his lugubrious learning curve showed it. Other kids were only cooperative as long as there was candy in the offing; the rest of the time, behaviors such as reading, writing, or completing math assignments seemed beyond their repertoire.
But those kids go home at the end of the day. We teachers sigh, mentally shake ourselves like a lab getting out of a pond of water, finish whatever paperwork must be turned in before the end of the day, and go home, to think about our students only sporadically. Your own kid doesn’t leave, especially during vacations; he’s there at noon, at 3, and at 730 at night too.
Parenting is exceptionally interesting when you’re the vacation parent. I spend a little over 4 weeks of the summer with Jake. Some of the days are easy, when we run up to the Denver museum, or the zoo, or when his friend comes over and they spend the day play-fighting mostly, upstairs in his room or in the yard. But the rest of the time, Jake voices only one ambition – to watch videos of Anime cartoons on the computer.
I understand his need for predictable, easy-to-decipher stories. As a kid, I loved the novels of Karl Mai for the same reason. I’ve no idea how many times I reread the tales of Old Shatterhand and his Apache friend Vinetou, acted them out with my friends when I could, daydreamed how I too would reduce foes to fearful jelly. But this summer I’ve decided to limit the time Jake spends with his Anime friends, in an effort to reduce his dependence on passive electronic entertainment.
My decision wasn’t well received.
“So I was thinking,” he said as we walked to the community garden to water our so-far-dormant seeds, “what if I read for an hour, and then I can get two hours on the computer?”
“You can get an hour if you spend an hour reading, and pick up a trashcan of sticks from the yard,” I responded.
“A trashcan? No way! Not gonna do it!”
“Ok, well, then you aren’t getting on the computer.”
If you’ve dealt with an eleven-year-old who thinks he’s getting a raw deal, you pretty well know what came next. Jake told me that I used to do fun things with him, but “now all we do is go to the community garden.” He told me that his dad was much more fun, because he took Jake fishing. That I was just as bad as his stepmother. He demanded to call his father (who is probably incommunicado on a fishing trip, but that was beside the point.) He demanded to go to his father’s house. When we got home and I still hadn’t relented, he picked up a book.
Ten minutes later he came out to where I was hanging the laundry on the line. “I’m sorry…”
And so it went for the next hour or so. He was angry, and said so, kicked shoes and books on the floor, yelled at the cats. Then he said he was sorry. Then he tried to negotiate the time back up to two hours. We compromised on an hour and half. He demanded I take him to his father’s house. He picked up the shovel, though I think not even he knew what he planned to do with it.
We’re still at it. He’s finished his reading; now he’ll need to do stick patrol; then he can get on the computer.
I, in the meantime, excoriate myself for not having set more limits on his computer use all along. When you’ve only got your kid a little of the time, it’s hard to remember that raising them is your job too.