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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, June 27, 2003

COMMENTARY
Keep family peace and earn points

By Annette Clifford
Gannett News Service

At wit's end already this summer and in need of distraction? Play Summer Survival: Parent Style, in which parents vie to win points for accomplishing the most challenging long-hot-summer-vacation tasks.

Contestants must start at home base, make frequent trips to day camps, pools, movie theaters and parks, visit at least one historical site, preferably in another state, and end up back at home base by the time school starts without having voted anyone out of the clan or off the island, or they will be disqualified. They can pick and choose any number of tasks, but no points are awarded for effort alone. Only actual completion of seemingly impossible summer tasks counts because, you know, if wishes were horses, every kid would have a horse, and, besides that, points are subtracted for parents who take the wimpy way out.

May the best parents win, or at least survive. And may the rest of us muddle through somehow, too.

Task 1: Keep kids of different ages with radically different interests entertained and adequately supervised for weeks on end without breaking the law, the bank or every dish in the house. 40 points.

Task 2: Persuade a teenager he or she cannot stay up until 1 a.m. just because it's summer and everyone else does it. 30 points.

Task 3: Convince the reluctant reader that while last year's teacher might have forgotten to send home a contract requiring half an hour of daily reading during the summer, it's still a good idea. 20 Points.

Task 4: Convince a 13-year-old that being 13 doesn't automatically mean one can watch any and every PG-13 movie. 20 points.

Task 5: Find and rent one movie the whole family is willing to watch and will actually enjoy together without discomfort on anyone's, especially the parent's, part. 80 points.

Task 6: You watch "Dumbo" while they watch "Invasion of the Big-Breasted, Alien-Killer Women from the Hood with Potty Mouth Mutation." Minus 80 points.

Task 7: Draw up a "computer-time" schedule that is perfectly equitable and pleases everyone in the family. 80 points.

Task 8: Buy everyone their own computer and pay to have the house rewired so everyone can be online simultaneously without interfacing with one another. Minus 50 points.

Task 9: Draw up a fee-based lawn-mowing schedule emphasizing and enforcing the fact that remuneration will be contingent upon a thorough job, not a creative, patchwork effort. 20 points.

Task 10: Mow the dumb lawn yourself while the kids fight over who's hogging the computer. Minus 20 points.

Task 11: Discuss, plan and actually go on a family vacation that won't bore kids of different ages and interests, frustrate or bankrupt Mom and Dad, and doesn't involve just shipping everyone off to different camps. 50 points.

Task 12: Start counting the days until school starts. Minus 100 points, with additional points subtracted if you do so before June 21, which is the official first day of summer.

Task 13: Live in the moment more, laugh more, put off anything that's no fun as long as possible more, and let the kids enjoy childhood summers while they last. 100 points.