When I was a kid, summer was the time of year I most looked forward to.  Does it get any better?  No school, lots of daylight, warm weather, and little structure.  I ran around like a banshee as a young child, hung out with my friends at the beach or the mall as a tweener, and worked at the drive-in, flirted with boys, and stayed out past midnight as an older teen.  Many phone conversations started with, “I’ve got nothing to do today…wanna hang out?”  It was bliss.

These days, the bliss has fizzled out of summer.  Not for just the grown-up reasons like a full-time job and the like, but because nothing strikes fear into my heart – and anxiety into my son – more than an unstructured day.  Tim, like many of our kids, takes comfort in his highly structured, highly repetitive, highly predicable routine.  When that routine is disrupted, for whatever reason, anxiety – and the manifestation of that anxiety – ensues.  So how can we create structure in what is for other kids highly desirable lack of structure?  Here’s some ideas on what we and others have done to create a routine during summer.

Summer School

For most kids it’s a punishment.  For Tim, it’s the continuation of the routine he depends on.  There’s fewer kids, shorter classes, and less chaos than the regular school year as well, but the trade off is it’s only a half day. 

Special Recreation

In Illinois, we are blessed with special recreation districts- park district programs for children and adults with special needs.  Many of the programs cater to persons with visual and physical disabilities, but there is an Adventures program for tweeners and teens with mental illness. Several times a month they go on day trips to water parks, bowling, or other outings with a very low kid to staff ratio.  If you’re in Illinois, find your local programs at the Special Recreation Network of Illinois.  If you’re in another part of the country and know about a similar program near you, please share a link in the comments.  If you are looking for a program near you, Google ‘adaptive recreation’ and your city or state.

 Summer Camp

They do exist!  There are summer camps for kids with bipolar disorder.  Megan Stack has listed several on her blog, under the “great websites” section. 

 Projects

Sounds hokey, but a good project will keep Tim going for days.  Last summer he knew he’d spend a week building stone planters around my parent’s house. Every day of that week he woke up knowing what he was supposed to do, and at the end, he had accomplished something that made him proud and his grandparents grateful.  Tim’s also old enough to mow lawns so part of is summer routine was to mow the front yard on Tuesdays and the back yard on Thursdays.  Sometimes the lawn looked like it was cut by Edvard Munch, but it was cut, he was happy, and I didn’t have to mow it.    

Please share some ideas of your own in the comments, and help another mom find the idea that will create structure for her kid, and help them both reclaim the bliss of summer.